(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome back to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Got a great conversation around Cloud Native, Cloud Native Journey, how enterprises are looking at Cloud Native and putting it all together. And it comes down to operations, developer productivity, and security. It's the hottest topic in technology. We got Chris Jones here in the studio, director of Product Management for Platform9. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Hey, thanks. >> So when we always chat about, when we're at KubeCon. KubeConEU is coming up and in a few, in a few months, the number one conversation is developer productivity. And the developers are driving all the standards. It's interesting to see how they just throw everything out there and whatever gets adopted ends up becoming the standard, not the old school way of kind of getting stuff done. So that's cool. Security Kubernetes and Containers are all kind of now that next level. So you're starting to see the early adopters moving to the mainstream. Enterprises, a variety of different approaches. You guys are at the center of this. We've had a couple conversations with your CEO and your tech team over there. What are you seeing? You're building the products. What's the core product focus right now for Platform9? What are you guys aiming for? >> The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers. We don't want people going back to what I've been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It's, hey, I've been told to do something. I kicked off this Container initiative. I need to run my software somewhere. I'm just going to go figure it out. We want to keep those people productive. At the same time we want to enable velocity for our operations teams, be it PlatformOps or DevOps. >> Take us through in your mind and how you see the industry rolling out this Cloud Native journey. Where do you see customers out there? Because DevOps have been around, DevSecOps is rocking, you're seeing AI, hot trend now. Developers are still in charge. Is there a change to the infrastructure of how developers get their coding done and the infrastructure, setting up the DevOps is key, but when you add the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise, what changes? What is the, what is the, I guess what is the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise these days? >> The Cloud Native journey or the change? When- >> Let's start with the, let's start with what they want to do. What's the goal and then how does that happen? >> I think the goal is that promise land. Increased resiliency, better scalability, and overall reduced costs. I've gone from physical to virtual that gave me a higher level of density, packing of resources. I'm moving to Containers. I'm removing that OS layer again. I'm getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I'm running Kubernetes. What does that, what does that fundamentally do to my operations? Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I'm running and how it's running so it fits that infrastructure? And that's the reality, is you can't just take a Container and drop it into Kubernetes and say, hey, I'm now Cloud Native. I've got reduced cost, or I've got better resiliency. There's things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is a Cloud Native. And then there's what I think is one of the largest shifts of virtual machines to containers. When I was in the world of application performance monitoring, we would see customers saying, well, my engineering team have this Java app, and they said it needs a VM with 12 gig of RAM and eight cores, and that's what we gave it. But it's running slow. I'm working with the application team and you can see it's running slow. And they're like, well, it's got all of its resources. One of those nice features of virtualization is over provisioning. So the infrastructure team would say, well, we gave it, we gave it all a RAM it needed. And what's wrong with that being over provisioned? It's like, well, Java expects that RAM to be there. Now all of a sudden, when you move to the world of containers, what we've got is that's not a set resource limit, really is like it used to be in a VM, right? When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes. So instead of just being able to say, hey, I'm throwing over the fence and now it's just going to run on a VM, and that VMs got everything it needs. It's now really running on more, much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors. They are going to impact who's making that decision around resourcing. Because that Kubernetes concept of over provisioning and the virtualization concept of over provisioning are not the same. So when I look at this problem, it's like, well, what changed? Well, I'll do my scale tests as an application developer and tester, and I'd see what resources it needs. I asked for that in the VM, that sets the high watermark, job's done. Well, Kubernetes, it's no longer a VM, it's a Kubernetes manifest. And well, who owns that? Who's writing it? Who's setting those limits? To me, that should be the application team. But then when it goes into operations world, they're like, well, that's now us. Can we change those? So it's that amalgamation of the two that is saying, I'm a developer. I used to pay attention, but now I need to pay attention. And an infrastructure person saying, I used to just give 'em what they wanted, but now I really need to know what they've wanted, because it's going to potentially have a catastrophic impact on what I'm running. >> So what's the impact for the developer? Because, infrastructure's code is what everybody wants. The developer just wants to get the code going and they got to pay attention to all these things, or don't they? Is that where you guys come in? How do you guys see the problem? Actually scope the problem that you guys solve? 'Cause I think you're getting at I think the core issue here, which is, I've got Kubernetes, I've got containers, I've got developer productivity that I want to focus on. What's the problem that you guys solve? >> Platform operation teams that are adopting Cloud Native in their environment, they've got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes plus this fundamental change of how an app runs. What we're doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location. Be that an air gap environment like a, let's say a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G. That's one thing that we can deploy and achieve in a completely inaccessible environment all the way through to Platform9 running traditionally as SaaS, as we were born, that's remotely managing and controlling your Kubernetes environments on-premise AWS. That hybrid cloud experience that could be also Bare Metal, but it's our platform running your environments with our support there, 24 by seven, that's proactively reaching out. So it's removing a lot of that burden and the complications that come along with operating the environment and standing it up, which means all of a sudden your DevOps and platform operations teams can go and work with your engineers and application developers and say, hey, let's get, let's focus on the stuff that, that we need to be focused on, which is running our business and providing a service to our customers. Not figuring out how to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster, add new nodes, and configure all of the low level. >> I mean there are, that's operations that just needs to work. And sounds like as they get into the Cloud Native kind of ops, there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes wrong. Or you go, oops, what do we buy into? Because the CIOs, let's go, let's go Cloud Native. We want to, we got to get set up for the future. We're going to be Cloud Native, not just lift and shift and we're going to actually build it out right. Okay, that sounds good. And when we have to actually get done. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You got to spin things up and stand up the infrastructure. What specifically use case do you guys see that emerges for Platform9 when people call you up and you go talk to customers and prospects? What's the one thing or use case or cases that you guys see that you guys solve the best? >> So I think one of the, one of the, I guess new use cases that are coming up now, everyone's talking about economic pressures. I think the, the tap blows open, just get it done. CIO is saying let's modernize, let's use the cloud. Now all of a sudden they're recognizing, well wait, we're spending a lot of money now. We've opened that tap all the way, what do we do? So now they're looking at ways to control that spend. So we're seeing that as a big emerging trend. What we're also sort of seeing is people looking at their data centers and saying, well, I've got this huge legacy environment that's running a hypervisor. It's running VMs. Can we still actually do what we need to do? Can we modernize? Can we start this Cloud Native journey without leaving our data centers, our co-locations? Or if I do want to reduce costs, is that that thing that says maybe I'm repatriating or doing a reverse migration? Do I have to go back to my data center or are there other alternatives? And we're seeing that trend a lot. And our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those, those occurrences. So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds. And we've worked with a lot of those users and customers that we have and asked the questions, what's important? And today, when we look at the world of Cloud Native, you can run virtualization within Kubernetes. So you can, instead of running two separate platforms, you can have one. So all of a sudden, if you're looking to modernize, you can start on that new infrastructure stack that can run anywhere, Kubernetes, and you can start bringing VMs over there as you are containerizing at the same time. So now you can keep your application operations in one environment. And this also helps if you're trying to reduce costs. If you really are saying, we put that Dev environment in AWS, we've got a huge amount of velocity out of it now, can we do that elsewhere? Is there a co-location we can go to? Is there a provider that we can go to where we can run that infrastructure or run the Kubernetes, but not have to run the infrastructure? >> It's going to be interesting too, when you see the Edge come online, you start, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, KubeCon events we're going to be at, the conversation is not just about public cloud. And you guys obviously solve a lot of do-it-yourself implementation hassles that emerge when people try to kind of stand up their own environment. And we hear from developers consistency between code, managing new updates, making sure everything is all solid so they can go fast. That's the goal. And that, and then people can get standardized on that. But as you get public cloud and do it yourself, kind of brings up like, okay, there's some gaps there as the architecture changes to be more distributed computing, Edge, on-premises cloud, it's cloud operations. So that's cool for DevOps and Cloud Native. How do you guys differentiate from say, some the public cloud opportunities and the folks who are doing it themselves? How do you guys fit in that world and what's the pitch or what's the story? >> The fit that we look at is that third alternative. Let's get your team focused on what's high value to your business and let us deliver that public cloud experience on your infrastructure or in the public cloud, which gives you that ability to still be flexible if you want to make choices to run consistently for your developers in two different locations. So as I touched on earlier, instead of saying go figure out Kubernetes, how do you upgrade a hundred worker nodes in place upgrade. We've solved that problem. That's what we do every single day of the week. Don't go and try to figure out how to upgrade a cluster and then upgrade all of the, what I call Kubernetes friends, your core DNSs, your metrics server, your Kubernetes dashboard. These are all things that we package, we test, we version. So when you click upgrade, we've already handled that entire process. So it's saying don't have your team focused on that lower level piece of work. Get them focused on what is important, which is your business services. >> Yeah, the infrastructure and getting that stood up. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting, if you look at the market right now, you mentioned cost savings and recovery, obviously kind of a recession. I mean, people are tightening their belts for sure. I don't think the digital transformation and Cloud Native spend is going to plummet. It's going to probably be on hold and be squeezed a little bit. But to your point, people are refactoring looking at how to get the best out of what they got. It's not just open the tap of spend the cash like it used to be. Yeah, a couple months, even a couple years ago. So okay, I get that. But then you look at the what's coming, AI. You're seeing all the new data infrastructure that's coming. The containers, Kubernetes stuff, got to get stood up pretty quickly and it's got to be reliable. So to your point, the teams need to get done with this and move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> 'Cause there's more coming. I mean, there's a lot coming for the apps that are building in Data Native, AI-Native, Cloud Native. So it seems that this Kubernetes thing needs to get solved. Is that kind of what you guys are focused on right now? >> So, I mean to use a customer, we have a customer that's in AI/ML and they run their platform at customer sites and that's hardware bound. You can't run AI machine learning on anything anywhere. Well, with Platform9 they can. So we're enabling them to deliver services into their customers that's running their AI/ML platform in their customer's data centers anywhere in the world on hardware that is purpose-built for running that workload. They're not Kubernetes experts. That's what we are. We're bringing them that ability to focus on what's important and just delivering their business services whilst they're enabling our team. And our 24 by seven proactive management are always on assurance to keep that up and running for them. So when something goes bump at the night at 2:00am, our guys get woken up. They're the ones that are reaching out to the customer saying, your environments have a problem, we're taking these actions to fix it. Obviously sometimes, especially if it is running on Bare Metal, there's things you can't do remotely. So you might need someone to go and do that. But even when that happens, you're not by yourself. You're not sitting there like I did when I worked for a bank in one of my first jobs, three o'clock in the morning saying, wow, our end of day processing is stuck. Who else am I waking up? Right? >> Exactly, yeah. Got to get that cash going. But this is a great use case. I want to get to the customer. What do some of the successful customers say to you for the folks watching that aren't yet a customer of Platform9, what are some of the accolades and comments or anecdotes that you guys hear from customers that you have? >> It just works, which I think is probably one of the best ones you can get. Customers coming back and being able to show to their business that they've delivered growth, like business growth and productivity growth and keeping their organization size the same. So we started on our containerization journey. We went to Kubernetes. We've deployed all these new workloads and our operations team is still six people. We're doing way more with growth less, and I think that's also talking to the strength that we're bringing, 'cause we're, we're augmenting that team. They're spending less time on the really low level stuff and automating a lot of the growth activity that's involved. So when it comes to being able to grow their business, they can just focus on that, not- >> Well you guys do the heavy lifting, keep on top of the Kubernetes, make sure that all the versions are all done. Everything's stable and consistent so they can go on and do the build out and provide their services. That seems to be what you guys are best at. >> Correct, correct. >> And so what's on the roadmap? You have the product, direct product management, you get the keys to the kingdom. What is, what is the focus? What's your focus right now? Obviously Kubernetes is growing up, Containers. We've been hearing a lot at the last KubeCon about the security containers is getting better. You've seen verification, a lot more standards around some things. What are you focused on right now for at a product over there? >> Edge is a really big focus for us. And I think in Edge you can look at it in two ways. The mantra that I drive is Edge must be remote. If you can't do something remotely at the Edge, you are using a human being, that's not Edge. Our Edge management capabilities and being in the market for over two years are a hundred percent remote. You want to stand up a store, you just ship the server in there, it gets racked, the rest of it's remote. Imagine a store manager in, I don't know, KFC, just plugging in the server, putting in the ethernet cable, pressing the power button. The rest of all that provisioning for that Cloud Native stack, Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization is done remotely. So we're continuing to focus on that. The next piece that is related to that is allowing people to run Platform9 SaaS in their data centers. So we do ag app today and we've had a really strong focus on telecommunications and the containerized network functions that come along with that. So this next piece is saying, we're bringing what we run as SaaS into your data center, so then you can run it. 'Cause there are many people out there that are saying, we want these capabilities and we want everything that the Platform9 control plane brings and simplifies. But unfortunately, regulatory compliance reasons means that we can't leverage SaaS. So they might be using a cloud, but they're saying that's still our infrastructure. We're still closed that network down, or they're still on-prem. So they're two big priorities for us this year. And that on-premise experiences is paramount, even to the point that we will be delivering a way that when you run an on-premise, you can still say, wait a second, well I can send outbound alerts to Platform9. So their support team can still be proactively helping me as much as they could, even though I'm running Platform9s control plane. So it's sort of giving that blend of two experiences. They're big, they're big priorities. And the third pillar is all around virtualization. It's saying if you have economic pressures, then I think it's important to look at what you're spending today and realistically say, can that be reduced? And I think hypervisors and virtualization is something that should be looked at, because if you can actually reduce that spend, you can bring in some modernization at the same time. Let's take some of those nos that exist that are two years into their five year hardware life cycle. Let's turn that into a Cloud Native environment, which is enabling your modernization in place. It's giving your engineers and application developers the new toys, the new experiences, and then you can start running some of those virtualized workloads with KubeVirt, there. So you're reducing cost and you're modernizing at the same time with your existing infrastructure. >> You know Chris, the topic of this content series that we're doing with you guys is finding the right path, trusting the right path to Cloud Native. What does that mean? I mean, if you had to kind of summarize that phrase, trusting the right path to Cloud Native, what does that mean? It mean in terms of architecture, is it deployment? Is it operations? What's the underlying main theme of that quote? What's the, what's? How would you talk to a customer and say, what does that mean if someone said, "Hey, what does that right path mean?" >> I think the right path means focusing on what you should be focusing on. I know I've said it a hundred times, but if your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ah, I need Metrics Server to make something function. I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler and I need this other thing, now I need to manage that. That's not the right path. That's literally learning what other people have been learning for the last five, seven years that have been focused on Kubernetes solely. So the why- >> There's been a lot of grind. People have been grinding it out. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. They've been standing up the, when Kubernetes started, it was all the promise. >> Chris: Yep. >> And essentially manually kind of getting in in the weeds and configuring it. Now it's matured up. They want stability. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Not everyone can get down and dirty with Kubernetes. It's not something that people want to generally do unless you're totally into it, right? Like I mean, I mean ops teams, I mean, yeah. You know what I mean? It's not like it's heavy lifting. Yeah, it's important. Just got to get it going. >> Yeah, I mean if you're deploying with Platform9, your Ops teams can tinker to their hearts content. We're completely compliant upstream Kubernetes. You can go and change an API server flag, let's go and mess with the scheduler, because we want to. You can still do that, but don't, don't have your team investing in all this time to figure it out. It's been figured out. >> John: Got it. >> Get them focused on enabling velocity for your business. >> So it's not build, but run. >> Chris: Correct? >> Or run Kubernetes, not necessarily figure out how to kind of get it all, consume it out. >> You know we've talked to a lot of customers out there that are saying, "I want to be able to deliver a service to my users." Our response is, "Cool, let us run it. You consume it, therefore deliver it." And we're solving that in one hit versus figuring out how to first run it, then operate it, then turn that into a consumable service. >> So the alternative Platform9 is what? They got to do it themselves or use the Cloud or what's the, what's the alternative for the customer for not using Platform9? Hiring more people to kind of work on it? What's the? >> People, building that kind of PaaS experience? Something that I've been very passionate about for the past year is looking at that world of sort of GitOps and what that means. And if you go out there and you sort of start asking the question what's happening? Just generally with Kubernetes as well and GitOps in that scope, then you'll hear some people saying, well, I'm making it PaaS, because Kubernetes is too complicated for my developers and we need to give them something. There's some great material out there from the likes of Intuit and Adobe where for two big contributors to Argo and the Argo projects, they almost have, well they do have, different experiences. One is saying, we went down the PaaS route and it failed. The other one is saying, well we've built a really stable PaaS and it's working. What are they trying to do? They're trying to deliver an outcome to make it easy to use and consume Kubernetes. So you could go out there and say, hey, I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster. Sounds like Argo CD is a great way to expose that to my developers so they can use Kubernetes without having to use Kubernetes and start automating things. That is an approach, but you're going to be going completely open source and you're going to have to bring in all the individual components, or you could just lay that, lay it down, and consume it as a service and not have to- >> And mentioned to it. They were the ones who kind of brought that into the open. >> They did. Inuit is the primary contributor to the Argo set of products. >> How has that been received in the market? I mean, they had the event at the Computer History Museum last fall. What's the momentum there? What's the big takeaway from that project? >> Growth. To me, growth. I mean go and track the stars on that one. It's just, it's growth. It's unlocking machine learning. Argo workflows can do more than just make things happen. Argo CD I think the approach they're taking is, hey let's make this simple to use, which I think can be lost. And I think credit where credit's due, they're really pushing to bring in a lot of capabilities to make it easier to work with applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It's not just that, hey, here's a GitOps tool. It can take something from a Git repo and deploy it and maybe prioritize it and help you scale your operations from that perspective. It's taking a step back and saying, well how did we get to production in the first place? And what can be done down there to help as well? I think it's growth expansion of features. They had a huge release just come out in, I think it was 2.6, that brought in things that as a product manager that I don't often look at like really deep technical things and say wow, that's powerful. But they have, they've got some great features in that release that really do solve real problems. >> And as the product, as the product person, who's the target buyer for you? Who's the customer? Who's making that? And you got decision maker, influencer, and recommender. Take us through the customer persona for you guys. >> So that Platform Ops, DevOps space, right, the people that need to be delivering Containers as a service out to their organization. But then it's also important to say, well who else are our primary users? And that's developers, engineers, right? They shouldn't have to say, oh well I have access to a Kubernetes cluster. Do I have to use kubectl or do I need to go find some other tool? No, they can just log to Platform9. It's integrated with your enterprise id. >> They're the end customer at the end of the day, they're the user. >> Yeah, yeah. They can log in. And they can see the clusters you've given them access to as a Platform Ops Administrator. >> So job well done for you guys. And your mind is the developers are moving 'em fast, coding and happy. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> And and from a customer standpoint, you reduce the maintenance cost, because you keep the Ops smoother, so you got efficiency and maintenance costs kind of reduced or is that kind of the benefits? >> Yeah, yep, yeah. And at two o'clock in the morning when things go inevitably wrong, they're not there by themselves, and we're proactively working with them. >> And that's the uptime issue. >> That is the uptime issue. And Cloud doesn't solve that, right? Everyone experienced that Clouds can go down, entire regions can go offline. That's happened to all Cloud providers. And what do you do then? Kubernetes isn't your recovery plan. It's part of it, right, but it's that piece. >> You know Chris, to wrap up this interview, I will say that "theCUBE" is 12 years old now. We've been to OpenStack early days. We had you guys on when we were covering OpenStack and now Cloud has just been booming. You got AI around the corner, AI Ops, now you got all this new data infrastructure, it's just amazing Cloud growth, Cloud Native, Security Native, Cloud Native, Data Native, AI Native. It's going to be all, this is the new app environment, but there's also existing infrastructure. So going back to OpenStack, rolling our own cloud, building your own cloud, building infrastructure cloud, in a cloud way, is what the pioneers have done. I mean this is what we're at. Now we're at this scale next level, abstracted away and make it operational. It seems to be the key focus. We look at CNCF at KubeCon and what they're doing with the cloud SecurityCon, it's all about operations. >> Chris: Yep, right. >> Ops and you know, that's going to sound counterintuitive 'cause it's a developer open source environment, but you're starting to see that Ops focus in a good way. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Infrastructure as code way. >> Chris: Yep. >> What's your reaction to that? How would you summarize where we are in the industry relative to, am I getting, am I getting it right there? Is that the right view? What am I missing? What's the current state of the next level, NextGen infrastructure? >> It's a good question. When I think back to sort of late 2019, I sort of had this aha moment as I saw what really truly is delivering infrastructure as code happening at Platform9. There's an open source project Ironic, which is now also available within Kubernetes that is Metal Kubed that automates Bare Metal as code, which means you can go from an empty server, lay down your operating system, lay down Kubernetes, and you've just done everything delivered to your customer as code with a Cloud Native platform. That to me was sort of the biggest realization that I had as I was moving into this industry was, wait, it's there. This can be done. And the evolution of tooling and operations is getting to the point where that can be achieved and it's focused on by a number of different open source projects. Not just Ironic and and Metal Kubed, but that's a huge win. That is truly getting your infrastructure. >> John: That's an inflection point, really. >> Yeah. >> If you think about it, 'cause that's one of the problems. We had with the Bare Metal piece was the automation and also making it Cloud Ops, cloud operations. >> Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think Ironic did really well was saying let's just treat that piece of Bare Metal like a Cloud VM or an instance. If you got a problem with it, just give the person using it or whatever's using it, a new one and reimage it. Just tell it to reimage itself and it'll just (snaps fingers) go. You can do self-service with it. In Platform9, if you log in to our SaaS Ironic, you can go and say, I want that physical server to myself, because I've got a giant workload, or let's turn it into a Kubernetes cluster. That whole thing is automated. To me that's infrastructure as code. I think one of the other important things that's happening at the same time is we're seeing GitOps, we're seeing things like Terraform. I think it's important for organizations to look at what they have and ask, am I using tools that are fit for tomorrow or am I using tools that are yesterday's tools to solve tomorrow's problems? And when especially it comes to modernizing infrastructure as code, I think that's a big piece to look at. >> Do you see Terraform as old or new? >> I see Terraform as old. It's a fantastic tool, capable of many great things and it can work with basically every single provider out there on the planet. It is able to do things. Is it best fit to run in a GitOps methodology? I don't think it is quite at that point. In fact, if you went and looked at Flux, Flux has ways that make Terraform GitOps compliant, which is absolutely fantastic. It's using two tools, the best of breeds, which is solving that tomorrow problem with tomorrow solutions. >> Is the new solutions old versus new. I like this old way, new way. I mean, Terraform is not that old and it's been around for about eight years or so, whatever. But HashiCorp is doing a great job with that. I mean, so okay with Terraform, what's the new address? Is it more complex environments? Because Terraform made sense when you had basic DevOps, but now it sounds like there's a whole another level of complexity. >> I got to say. >> New tools. >> That kind of amalgamation of that application into infrastructure. Now my app team is paying way more attention to that manifest file, which is what GitOps is trying to solve. Let's templatize things. Let's version control our manifest, be it helm, customize, or just a straight up Kubernetes manifest file, plain and boring. Let's get that version controlled. Let's make sure that we know what is there, why it was changed. Let's get some auditability and things like that. And then let's get that deployment all automated. So that's predicated on the cluster existing. Well why can't we do the same thing with the cluster, the inception problem. So even if you're in public cloud, the question is like, well what's calling that API to call that thing to happen? Where is that file living? How well can I manage that in a large team? Oh my God, something just changed. Who changed it? Where is that file? And I think that's one of big, the big pieces to be sold. >> Yeah, and you talk about Edge too and on-premises. I think one of the things I'm observing and certainly when DevOps was rocking and rolling and infrastructures code was like the real push, it was pretty much the public cloud, right? >> Chris: Yep. >> And you did Cloud Native and you had stuff on-premises. Yeah you did some lifting and shifting in the cloud, but the cool stuff was going in the public cloud and you ran DevOps. Okay, now you got on-premise cloud operation and Edge. Is that the new DevOps? I mean 'cause what you're kind of getting at with old new, old new Terraform example is an interesting point, because you're pointing out potentially that that was good DevOps back in the day or it still is. >> Chris: It is, I was going to say. >> But depending on how you define what DevOps is. So if you say, I got the new DevOps with public on-premise and Edge, that's just not all public cloud, that's essentially distributed Cloud Native. >> Correct. Is that the new DevOps in your mind or is that? How would you, or is that oversimplifying it? >> Or is that that term where everyone's saying Platform Ops, right? Has it shifted? >> Well you bring up a good point about Terraform. I mean Terraform is well proven. People love it. It's got great use cases and now there seems to be new things happening. We call things like super cloud emerging, which is multicloud and abstraction layers. So you're starting to see stuff being abstracted away for the benefits of moving to the next level, so teams don't get stuck doing the same old thing. They can move on. Like what you guys are doing with Platform9 is providing a service so that teams don't have to do it. >> Correct, yeah. >> That makes a lot of sense, So you just, now it's running and then they move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, right. >> So what is that next thing? >> I think Edge is a big part of that next thing. The propensity for someone to put up with a delay, I think it's gone. For some reason, we've all become fairly short-tempered, Short fused. You know, I click the button, it should happen now, type people. And for better or worse, hopefully it gets better and we all become a bit more patient. But how do I get more effective and efficient at delivering that to that really demanding- >> I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's not just people are getting short-tempered. I think it's more of applications are being deployed faster, security is more exposed if they don't see things quicker. You got data now infrastructure scaling up massively. So, there's a double-edged swords to scale. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maintenance, downtime, uptime, security. So yeah, I think there's a tension around, and one hand enthusiasm around pushing a lot of code and new apps. But is the confidence truly there? It's interesting one little, (snaps finger) supply chain software, look at Container Security for instance. >> Yeah, yeah. It's big. I mean it was codified. >> Do you agree that people, that's kind of an issue right now. >> Yeah, and it was, I mean even the supply chain has been codified by the US federal government saying there's things we need to improve. We don't want to see software being a point of vulnerability, and software includes that whole process of getting it to a running point. >> It's funny you mentioned remote and one of the thing things that you're passionate about, certainly Edge has to be remote. You don't want to roll a truck or labor at the Edge. But I was doing a conversation with, at Rebars last year about space. It's hard to do brake fix on space. It's hard to do a, to roll a someone to configure satellite, right? Right? >> Chris: Yeah. >> So Kubernetes is in space. We're seeing a lot of Cloud Native stuff in apps, in space, so just an example. This highlights the fact that it's got to be automated. Is there a machine learning AI angle with all this ChatGPT talk going on? You see all the AI going the next level. Some pretty cool stuff and it's only, I know it's the beginning, but I've heard people using some of the new machine learning, large language models, large foundational models in areas I've never heard of. Machine learning and data centers, machine learning and configuration management, a lot of different ways. How do you see as the product person, you incorporating the AI piece into the products for Platform9? >> I think that's a lot about looking at the telemetry and the information that we get back and to use one of those like old idle terms, that continuous improvement loop to feed it back in. And I think that's really where machine learning to start with comes into effect. As we run across all these customers, our system that helps at two o'clock in the morning has that telemetry, it's got that data. We can see what's changing and what's happening. So it's writing the right algorithms, creating the right machine learning to- >> So training will work for you guys. You have enough data and the telemetry to do get that training data. >> Yeah, obviously there's a lot of investment required to get there, but that is something that ultimately that could be achieved with what we see in operating people's environments. >> Great. Chris, great to have you here in the studio. Going wide ranging conversation on Kubernetes and Platform9. I guess my final question would be how do you look at the next five years out there? Because you got to run the product management, you got to have that 20 mile steer, you got to look at the customers, you got to look at what's going on in the engineering and you got to kind of have that arc. This is the right path kind of view. What's the five year arc look like for you guys? How do you see this playing out? 'Cause KubeCon is coming up and we're you seeing Kubernetes kind of break away with security? They had, they didn't call it KubeCon Security, they call it CloudNativeSecurityCon, they just had in Seattle inaugural events seemed to go well. So security is kind of breaking out and you got Kubernetes. It's getting bigger. Certainly not going away, but what's your five year arc of of how Platform9 and Kubernetes and Ops evolve? >> It's to stay on that theme, it's focusing on what is most important to our users and getting them to a point where they can just consume it, so they're not having to operate it. So it's finding those big items and bringing that into our platform. It's something that's consumable, that's just taken care of, that's tested with each release. So it's simplifying operations more and more. We've always said freedom in cloud computing. Well we started on, we started on OpenStack and made that simple. Stable, easy, you just have it, it works. We're doing that with Kubernetes. We're expanding out that user, right, we're saying bring your developers in, they can download their Kube conflict. They can see those Containers that are running there. They can access the events, the log files. They can log in and build a VM using KubeVirt. They're self servicing. So it's alleviating pressures off of the Ops team, removing the help desk systems that people still seem to rely on. So it's like what comes into that field that is the next biggest issue? Is it things like CI/CD? Is it simplifying GitOps? Is it bringing in security capabilities to talk to that? Or is that a piece that is a best of breed? Is there a reason that it's been spun out to its own conference? Is this something that deserves a focus that should be a specialized capability instead of tooling and vendors that we work with, that we partner with, that could be brought in as a service. I think it's looking at those trends and making sure that what we bring in has the biggest impact to our users. >> That's awesome. Thanks for coming in. I'll give you the last word. Put a plug in for Platform9 for the people who are watching. What should they know about Platform9 that they might not know about it or what should? When should they call you guys and when should they engage? Take a take a minute to give the plug. >> The plug. I think it's, if your operations team is focused on building Kubernetes, stop. That shouldn't be the cloud. That shouldn't be in the Edge, that shouldn't be at the data center. They should be consuming it. If your engineering teams are all trying different ways and doing different things to use and consume Cloud Native services and Kubernetes, they shouldn't be. You want consistency. That's how you get economies of scale. Provide them with a simple platform that's integrated with all of your enterprise identity where they can just start consuming instead of having to solve these problems themselves. It's those, it's those two personas, right? Where the problems manifest. What are my operations teams doing, and are they delivering to my company or are they building infrastructure again? And are my engineers sprinting or crawling? 'Cause if they're not sprinting, you should be asked the question, do I have the right Cloud Native tooling in my environment and how can I get them back? >> I think it's developer productivity, uptime, security are the tell signs. You get that done. That's the goal of what you guys are doing, your mission. >> Chris: Yep. >> Great to have you on, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Chris: Thanks very much. 0 Okay, this is "theCUBE" here, finding the right path to Cloud Native. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, welcome back to Supercloud 2. Last August, at the first Supercloud event, we invited the broader community to help further define Supercloud, we assessed its viability, and identified the critical elements and deployment models of the concept. The objectives here at Supercloud too are, first of all, to continue to tighten and test the concept, the second is, we want to get real world input from practitioners on the problems that they're facing and the viability of Supercloud in terms of applying it to their business. So on the program, we got companies like Walmart, Sachs, Western Union, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, NASDAQ, and others. And the third thing that we want to do is we want to drill into the intersection of cloud and data to project what the future looks like in the context of Supercloud. So in this segment, we want to explore the concept of data architectures and what's going to be required for Supercloud. And I'm pleased to welcome one of our Supercloud sponsors, ChaosSearch, Ed Walsh is the CEO of the company, with Thomas Hazel, who's the Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist. Guys, good to see you again, thanks for coming into our Marlborough studio. >> Always great. >> Great to be here. >> Okay, so there's a little debate, I'm going to put you right in the spot. (Ed chuckling) A little debate going on in the community started by Bob Muglia, a former CEO of Snowflake, and he was at Microsoft for a long time, and he looked at the Supercloud definition, said, "I think you need to tighten it up a little bit." So, here's what he came up with. He said, "A Supercloud is a platform that provides a programmatically consistent set of services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So he's calling it a platform, not an architecture, which was kind of interesting. And so presumably the platform owner is going to be responsible for the architecture, but Dr. Nelu Mihai, who's a computer scientist behind the Cloud of Clouds Project, he chimed in and responded with the following. He said, "Cloud is a programming paradigm supporting the entire lifecycle of applications with data and logic natively distributed. Supercloud is an open architecture that integrates heterogeneous clouds in an agnostic manner." So, Ed, words matter. Is this an architecture or is it a platform? >> Put us on the spot. So, I'm sure you have concepts, I would say it's an architectural or design principle. Listen, I look at Supercloud as a mega trend, just like cloud, just like data analytics. And some companies are using the principle, design principles, to literally get dramatically ahead of everyone else. I mean, things you couldn't possibly do if you didn't use cloud principles, right? So I think it's a Supercloud effect, you're able to do things you're not able to. So I think it's more a design principle, but if you do it right, you get dramatic effect as far as customer value. >> So the conversation that we were having with Muglia, and Tristan Handy of dbt Labs, was, I'll set it up as the following, and, Thomas, would love to get your thoughts, if you have a CRM, think about applications today, it's all about forms and codifying business processes, you type a bunch of stuff into Salesforce, and all the salespeople do it, and this machine generates a forecast. What if you have this new type of data app that pulls data from the transaction system, the e-commerce, the supply chain, the partner ecosystem, et cetera, and then, without humans, actually comes up with a plan. That's their vision. And Muglia was saying, in order to do that, you need to rethink data architectures and database architectures specifically, you need to get down to the level of how the data is stored on the disc. What are your thoughts on that? Well, first of all, I'm going to cop out, I think it's actually both. I do think it's a design principle, I think it's not open technology, but open APIs, open access, and you can build a platform on that design principle architecture. Now, I'm a database person, I love solving the database problems. >> I'm waited for you to launch into this. >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, Snowflake is a database, right? It's a distributed database. And we wanted to crack those codes, because, multi-region, multi-cloud, customers wanted access to their data, and their data is in a variety of forms, all these services that you're talked about. And so what I saw as a core principle was cloud object storage, everyone streams their data to cloud object storage. From there we said, well, how about we rethink database architecture, rethink file format, so that we can take each one of these services and bring them together, whether distributively or centrally, such that customers can access and get answers, whether it's operational data, whether it's business data, AKA search, or SQL, complex distributed joins. But we had to rethink the architecture. I like to say we're not a first generation, or a second, we're a third generation distributed database on pure, pure cloud storage, no caching, no SSDs. Why? Because all that availability, the cost of time, is a struggle, and cloud object storage, we think, is the answer. >> So when you're saying no caching, so when I think about how companies are solving some, you know, pretty hairy problems, take MySQL Heatwave, everybody thought Oracle was going to just forget about MySQL, well, they come out with Heatwave. And the way they solve problems, and you see their benchmarks against Amazon, "Oh, we crush everybody," is they put it all in memory. So you said no caching? You're not getting performance through caching? How is that true, and how are you getting performance? >> Well, so five, six years ago, right? When you realize that cloud object storage is going to be everywhere, and it's going to be a core foundational, if you will, fabric, what would you do? Well, a lot of times the second generation say, "We'll take it out of cloud storage, put in SSDs or something, and put into cache." And that adds a lot of time, adds a lot of costs. But I said, what if, what if we could actually make the first read hot, the first read distributed joins and searching? And so what we went out to do was said, we can't cache, because that's adds time, that adds cost. We have to make cloud object storage high performance, like it feels like a caching SSD. That's where our patents are, that's where our technology is, and we've spent many years working towards this. So, to me, if you can crack that code, a lot of these issues we're talking about, multi-region, multicloud, different services, everybody wants to send their data to the data lake, but then they move it out, we said, "Keep it right there." >> You nailed it, the data gravity. So, Bob's right, the data's coming in, and you need to get the data from everywhere, but you need an environment that you can deal with all that different schema, all the different type of technology, but also at scale. Bob's right, you cannot use memory or SSDs to cache that, that doesn't scale, it doesn't scale cost effectively. But if you could, and what you did, is you made object storage, S3 first, but object storage, the only persistence by doing that. And then we get performance, we should talk about it, it's literally, you know, hundreds of terabytes of queries, and it's done in seconds, it's done without memory caching. We have concepts of caching, but the only caching, the only persistence, is actually when we're doing caching, we're just keeping another side-eye track of things on the S3 itself. So we're using, actually, the object storage to be a database, which is kind of where Bob was saying, we agree, but that's what you started at, people thought you were crazy. >> And maybe make it live. Don't think of it as archival or temporary space, make it live, real time streaming, operational data. What we do is make it smart, we see the data coming in, we uniquely index it such that you can get your use cases, that are search, observability, security, or backend operational. But we don't have to have this, I dunno, static, fixed, siloed type of architecture technologies that were traditionally built prior to Supercloud thinking. >> And you don't have to move everything, essentially, you can do it wherever the data lands, whatever cloud across the globe, you're able to bring it together, you get the cost effectiveness, because the only persistence is the cheapest storage persistent layer you can buy. But the key thing is you cracked the code. >> We had to crack the code, right? That was the key thing. >> That's where the plans are. >> And then once you do that, then everything else gets easier to scale, your architecture, across regions, across cloud. >> Now, it's a general purpose database, as Bob was saying, but we use that database to solve a particular issue, which is around operational data, right? So, we agree with Bob's. >> Interesting. So this brings me to this concept of data, Jimata Gan is one of our speakers, you know, we talk about data fabric, which is a NetApp, originally NetApp concept, Gartner's kind of co-opted it. But so, the basic concept is, data lives everywhere, whether it's an S3 bucket, or a SQL database, or a data lake, it's just a node on the data mesh. So in your view, how does this fit in with Supercloud? Ed, you've said that you've built, essentially, an enabler for that, for the data mesh, I think you're an enabler for the Supercloud-like principles. This is a big, chewy opportunity, and it requires, you know, a team approach. There's got to be an ecosystem, there's not going to be one Supercloud to rule them all, so where does the ecosystem fit into the discussion, and where do you fit into the ecosystem? >> Right, so we agree completely, there's not one Supercloud in effect, but we use Supercloud principles to build our platform, and then, you know, the ecosystem's going to be built on leveraging what everyone else's secret powers are, right? So our power, our superpower, based upon what we built is, we deal with, if you're having any scale, or cost effective scale issues, with data, machine generated data, like business observability or security data, we are your force multiplier, we will take that in singularly, just let it, simply put it in your object storage wherever it sits, and we give you uniformity access to that using OpenAPI access, SQL, or you know, Elasticsearch API. So, that's what we do, that's our superpower. So I'll play it into data mesh, that's a perfect, we are a node on a data mesh, but I'll play it in the soup about how, the ecosystem, we see it kind of playing, and we talked about it in just in the last couple days, how we see this kind of possibly. Short term, our superpowers, we deal with this data that's coming at these environments, people, customers, building out observability or security environments, or vendors that are selling their own Supercloud, I do observability, the Datadogs of the world, dot dot dot, the Splunks of the world, dot dot dot, and security. So what we do is we fit in naturally. What we do is a cost effective scale, just land it anywhere in the world, we deal with ingest, and it's a cost effective, an order of magnitude, or two or three order magnitudes more cost effective. Allows them, their customers are asking them to do the impossible, "Give me fast monitoring alerting. I want it snappy, but I want it to keep two years of data, (laughs) and I want it cost effective." It doesn't work. They're good at the fast monitoring alerting, we're good at the long-term retention. And yet there's some gray area between those two, but one to one is actually cheaper, so we would partner. So the first ecosystem plays, who wants to have the ability to, really, all the data's in those same environments, the security observability players, they can literally, just through API, drag our data into their point to grab. We can make it seamless for customers. Right now, we make it helpful to customers. Your Datadog, we make a button, easy go from Datadog to us for logs, save you money. Same thing with Grafana. But you can also look at ecosystem, those same vendors, it used to be a year ago it was, you know, its all about how can you grow, like it's growth at all costs, now it's about cogs. So literally we can go an environment, you supply what your customer wants, but we can help with cogs. And one-on one in a partnership is better than you trying to build on your own. >> Thomas, you were saying you make the first read fast, so you think about Snowflake. Everybody wants to talk about Snowflake and Databricks. So, Snowflake, great, but you got to get the data in there. All right, so that's, can you help with that problem? >> I mean we want simple in, right? And if you have to have structure in, you're not simple. So the idea that you have a simple in, data lake, schema read type philosophy, but schema right type performance. And so what I wanted to do, what we have done, is have that simple lake, and stream that data real time, and those access points of Search or SQL, to go after whatever business case you need, security observability, warehouse integration. But the key thing is, how do I make that click, click, click answer, and do it quickly? And so what we want to do is, that first read has to be fast. Why? 'Cause then you're going to do all this siloing, layers, complexity. If your first read's not fast, you're at a disadvantage, particularly in cost. And nobody says I want less data, but everyone has to, whether they say we're going to shorten the window, we're going to use AI to choose, but in a security moment, when you don't have that answer, you're in trouble. And that's why we are this service, this Supercloud service, if you will, providing access, well-known search, well-known SQL type access, that if you just have one access point, you're at a disadvantage. >> We actually talked about Snowflake and BigQuery, and a different platform, Data Bricks. That's kind of where we see the phase two of ecosystem. One is easy, the low-hanging fruit is observability and security firms. But the next one is, what we do, our super power is dealing with this messy data that schema is changing like night and day. Pipelines are tough, and it's changing all the time, but you want these things fast, and it's big data around the world. That's the next point, just use us alongside, or inside, one of their platforms, and now we get the best of both worlds. Our superpower is keeping this messy data as a streaming, okay, not a batch thing, allow you to do that. So, that's the second one. And then to be honest, the third one, which plays you to Supercloud, it also plays perfectly in the data mesh, is if you really go to the ultimate thing, what we have done is made object storage, S3, GCS, and blob storage, we made it a database. Put, get, complex query with big joins. You know, so back to your original thing, and Muglia teed it up perfectly, we've done that. Now imagine if that's an ecosystem, who would want that? If it's, again, it's uniform available across all the regions, across all the clouds, and it's right next to where you are building a service, or a client's trying, that's where the ecosystem, I think people are going to use Superclouds for their superpowers. We're really good at this, allows that short term. I think the Snowflakes and the Data Bricks are the medium term, you know? And then I think eventually gets to, hey, listen if you can make object storage fast, you can just go after it with simple SQL queries, or elastic. Who would want that? I think that's where people are going to leverage it. It's not going to be one Supercloud, and we leverage the super clouds. >> Our viewpoint is smart object storage can be programmable, and so we agree with Bob, but we're not saying do it here, do it here. This core, fundamental layer across regions, across clouds, that everyone has? Simple in. Right now, it's hard to get data in for access for analysis. So we said, simply, we'll automate the entire process, give you API access across regions, across clouds. And again, how do you do a distributed join that's fast? How do you do a distributed join that doesn't cost you an arm or a leg? And how do you do it at scale? And that's where we've been focused. >> So prior, the cloud object store was a niche. >> Yeah. >> S3 obviously changed that. How standard is, essentially, object store across the different cloud platforms? Is that a problem for you? Is that an easy thing to solve? >> Well, let's talk about it. I mean we've fundamentally, yeah we've extracted it, but fundamentally, cloud object storage, put, get, and list. That's why it's so scalable, 'cause it doesn't have all these other components. That complexity is where we have moved up, and provide direct analytical API access. So because of its simplicity, and costs, and security, and reliability, it can scale naturally. I mean, really, distributed object storage is easy, it's put-get anywhere, now what we've done is we put a layer of intelligence, you know, call it smart object storage, where access is simple. So whether it's multi-region, do a query across, or multicloud, do a query across, or hunting, searching. >> We've had clients doing Amazon and Google, we have some Azure, but we see Amazon and Google more, and it's a consistent service across all of them. Just literally put your data in the bucket of choice, or folder of choice, click a couple buttons, literally click that to say "that's hot," and after that, it's hot, you can see it. But we're not moving data, the data gravity issue, that's the other. That it's already natively flowing to these pools of object storage across different regions and clouds. We don't move it, we index it right there, we're spinning up stateless compute, back to the Supercloud concept. But now that allows us to do all these other things, right? >> And it's no longer just cheap and deep object storage. Right? >> Yeah, we make it the same, like you have an analytic platform regardless of where you're at, you don't have to worry about that. Yeah, we deal with that, we deal with a stateless compute coming up -- >> And make it programmable. Be able to say, "I want this bucket to provide these answers." Right, that's really the hope, the vision. And the complexity to build the entire stack, and then connect them together, we said, the fabric is cloud storage, we just provide the intelligence on top. >> Let's bring it back to the customers, and one of the things we're exploring in Supercloud too is, you know, is Supercloud a solution looking for a problem? Is a multicloud really a problem? I mean, you hear, you know, a lot of the vendor marketing says, "Oh, it's a disaster, because it's all different across the clouds." And I talked to a lot of customers even as part of Supercloud too, they're like, "Well, I solved that problem by just going mono cloud." Well, but then you're not able to take advantage of a lot of the capabilities and the primitives that, you know, like Google's data, or you like Microsoft's simplicity, their RPA, whatever it is. So what are customers telling you, what are their near term problems that they're trying to solve today, and how are they thinking about the future? >> Listen, it's a real problem. I think it started, I think this is a a mega trend, just like cloud. Just, cloud data, and I always add, analytics, are the mega trends. If you're looking at those, if you're not considering using the Supercloud principles, in other words, leveraging what I have, abstracting it out, and getting the most out of that, and then build value on top, I think you're not going to be able to keep up, In fact, no way you're going to keep up with this data volume. It's a geometric challenge, and you're trying to do linear things. So clients aren't necessarily asking, hey, for Supercloud, but they're really saying, I need to have a better mechanism to simplify this and get value across it, and how do you abstract that out to do that? And that's where they're obviously, our conversations are more amazed what we're able to do, and what they're able to do with our platform, because if you think of what we've done, the S3, or GCS, or object storage, is they can't imagine the ingest, they can't imagine how easy, time to glass, one minute, no matter where it lands in the world, querying this in seconds for hundreds of terabytes squared. People are amazed, but that's kind of, so they're not asking for that, but they are amazed. And then when you start talking on it, if you're an enterprise person, you're building a big cloud data platform, or doing data or analytics, if you're not trying to leverage the public clouds, and somehow leverage all of them, and then build on top, then I think you're missing it. So they might not be asking for it, but they're doing it. >> And they're looking for a lens, you mentioned all these different services, how do I bring those together quickly? You know, our viewpoint, our service, is I have all these streams of data, create a lens where they want to go after it via search, go after via SQL, bring them together instantly, no e-tailing out, no define this table, put into this database. We said, let's have a service that creates a lens across all these streams, and then make those connections. I want to take my CRM with my Google AdWords, and maybe my Salesforce, how do I do analysis? Maybe I want to hunt first, maybe I want to join, maybe I want to add another stream to it. And so our viewpoint is, it's so natural to get into these lake platforms and then provide lenses to get that access. >> And they don't want it separate, they don't want something different here, and different there. They want it basically -- >> So this is our industry, right? If something new comes out, remember virtualization came out, "Oh my God, this is so great, it's going to solve all these problems." And all of a sudden it just got to be this big, more complex thing. Same thing with cloud, you know? It started out with S3, and then EC2, and now hundreds and hundreds of different services. So, it's a complex matter for a lot of people, and this creates problems for customers, especially when you got divisions that are using different clouds, and you're saying that the solution, or a solution for the part of the problem, is to really allow the data to stay in place on S3, use that standard, super simple, but then give it what, Ed, you've called superpower a couple of times, to make it fast, make it inexpensive, and allow you to do that across clouds. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I'll give you guys the last word on that. >> No, listen, I think, we think Supercloud allows you to do a lot more. And for us, data, everyone says more data, more problems, more budget issue, everyone knows more data is better, and we show you how to do it cost effectively at scale. And we couldn't have done it without the design principles of we're leveraging the Supercloud to get capabilities, and because we use super, just the object storage, we're able to get these capabilities of ingest, scale, cost effectiveness, and then we built on top of this. In the end, a database is a data platform that allows you to go after everything distributed, and to get one platform for analytics, no matter where it lands, that's where we think the Supercloud concepts are perfect, that's where our clients are seeing it, and we're kind of excited about it. >> Yeah a third generation database, Supercloud database, however we want to phrase it, and make it simple, but provide the value, and make it instant. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming into the studio today, I really thank you for your support of theCUBE, and theCUBE community, it allows us to provide events like this and free content. I really appreciate it. >> Oh, thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, this is Dave Vellante for John Furrier in theCUBE community, thanks for being with us today. You're watching Supercloud 2, keep it right there for more thought provoking discussions around the future of cloud and data. (bright music)

>> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. This is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jack Greenfield. He's the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and the Chief Architect for the global technology platform at Walmart. Jack, I want to thank you for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me and appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Now we call what you've built a SuperCloud. That's our term, not yours, but how would you describe the Walmart Cloud Native Platform? >> So WCNP, as the acronym goes, is essentially an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. And what that means is that we've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source, and we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. So Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. It does a lot. In particular the orchestration of containers, but it delegates through API a lot of key functions. So for example, secret management, traffic management, there's a need for telemetry and observability at a scale beyond what you get from raw Kubernetes. That is to say, harvesting the metrics that are coming out of Kubernetes and processing them, storing them in time series databases, dashboarding them, and so on. There's also an angle to Kubernetes that gets a lot of attention in the daily DevOps routine, that's not really part of the open source deliverable itself, and that is the DevOps sort of CICD pipeline-oriented lifecycle. And that is something else that we've added and integrated nicely. And then one more piece of this picture is that within a Kubernetes cluster, there's a function that is critical to allowing services to discover each other and integrate with each other securely and with proper configuration provided by the concept of a service mesh. So Istio, Linkerd, these are examples of service mesh technologies. And we have gone ahead and integrated actually those two. There's more than those two, but we've integrated those two with Kubernetes. So the net effect is that when a developer within Walmart is going to build an application, they don't have to think about all those other capabilities where they come from or how they're provided. Those are already present, and the way the CICD pipelines are set up, it's already sort of in the picture, and there are configuration points that they can take advantage of in the primary YAML and a couple of other pieces of config that we supply where they can tune it. But at the end of the day, it offloads an awful lot of work for them, having to stand up and operate those services, fail them over properly, and make them robust. All of that's provided for. >> Yeah, you know, developers often complain they spend too much time wrangling and doing things that aren't productive. So I wonder if you could talk about the high level business goals of the initiative in terms of the hardcore benefits. Was the real impetus to tap into best of breed cloud services? Were you trying to cut costs? Maybe gain negotiating leverage with the cloud guys? Resiliency, you know, I know was a major theme. Maybe you could give us a sense of kind of the anatomy of the decision making process that went in. >> Sure, and in the course of answering your question, I think I'm going to introduce the concept of our triplet architecture which we haven't yet touched on in the interview here. First off, just to sort of wrap up the motivation for WCNP itself which is kind of orthogonal to the triplet architecture. It can exist with or without it. Currently does exist with it, which is key, and I'll get to that in a moment. The key drivers, business drivers for WCNP were developer productivity by offloading the kinds of concerns that we've just discussed. Number two, improving resiliency, that is to say reducing opportunity for human error. One of the challenges you tend to run into in a large enterprise is what we call snowflakes, lots of gratuitously different workloads, projects, configurations to the extent that by developing and using WCNP and continuing to evolve it as we have, we end up with cookie cutter like consistency across our workloads which is super valuable when it comes to building tools or building services to automate operations that would otherwise be manual. When everything is pretty much done the same way, that becomes much simpler. Another key motivation for WCNP was the ability to abstract from the underlying cloud provider. And this is going to lead to a discussion of our triplet architecture. At the end of the day, when one works directly with an underlying cloud provider, one ends up taking a lot of dependencies on that particular cloud provider. Those dependencies can be valuable. For example, there are best of breed services like say Cloud Spanner offered by Google or say Cosmos DB offered by Microsoft that one wants to use and one is willing to take the dependency on the cloud provider to get that functionality because it's unique and valuable. On the other hand, one doesn't want to take dependencies on a cloud provider that don't add a lot of value. And with Kubernetes, we have the opportunity, and this is a large part of how Kubernetes was designed and why it is the way it is, we have the opportunity to sort of abstract from the underlying cloud provider for stateless workloads on compute. And so what this lets us do is build container-based applications that can run without change on different cloud provider infrastructure. So the same applications can run on WCNP over Azure, WCNP over GCP, or WCNP over the Walmart private cloud. And we have a private cloud. Our private cloud is OpenStack based and it gives us some significant cost advantages as well as control advantages. So to your point, in terms of business motivation, there's a key cost driver here, which is that we can use our own private cloud when it's advantageous and then use the public cloud provider capabilities when we need to. A key place with this comes into play is with elasticity. So while the private cloud is much more cost effective for us to run and use, it isn't as elastic as what the cloud providers offer, right? We don't have essentially unlimited scale. We have large scale, but the public cloud providers are elastic in the extreme which is a very powerful capability. So what we're able to do is burst, and we use this term bursting workloads into the public cloud from the private cloud to take advantage of the elasticity they offer and then fall back into the private cloud when the traffic load diminishes to the point where we don't need that elastic capability, elastic capacity at low cost. And this is a very important paradigm that I think is going to be very commonplace ultimately as the industry evolves. Private cloud is easier to operate and less expensive, and yet the public cloud provider capabilities are difficult to match. >> And the triplet, the tri is your on-prem private cloud and the two public clouds that you mentioned, is that right? >> That is correct. And we actually have an architecture in which we operate all three of those cloud platforms in close proximity with one another in three different major regions in the US. So we have east, west, and central. And in each of those regions, we have all three cloud providers. And the way it's configured, those data centers are within 10 milliseconds of each other, meaning that it's of negligible cost to interact between them. And this allows us to be fairly agnostic to where a particular workload is running. >> Does a human make that decision, Jack or is there some intelligence in the system that determines that? >> That's a really great question, Dave. And it's a great question because we're at the cusp of that transition. So currently humans make that decision. Humans choose to deploy workloads into a particular region and a particular provider within that region. That said, we're actively developing patterns and practices that will allow us to automate the placement of the workloads for a variety of criteria. For example, if in a particular region, a particular provider is heavily overloaded and is unable to provide the level of service that's expected through our SLAs, we could choose to fail workloads over from that cloud provider to a different one within the same region. But that's manual today. We do that, but people do it. Okay, we'd like to get to where that happens automatically. In the same way, we'd like to be able to automate the failovers, both for high availability and sort of the heavier disaster recovery model between, within a region between providers and even within a provider between the availability zones that are there, but also between regions for the sort of heavier disaster recovery or maintenance driven realignment of workload placement. Today, that's all manual. So we have people moving workloads from region A to region B or data center A to data center B. It's clean because of the abstraction. The workloads don't have to know or care, but there are latency considerations that come into play, and the humans have to be cognizant of those. And automating that can help ensure that we get the best performance and the best reliability. >> But you're developing the dataset to actually, I would imagine, be able to make those decisions in an automated fashion over time anyway. Is that a fair assumption? >> It is, and that's what we're actively developing right now. So if you were to look at us today, we have these nice abstractions and APIs in place, but people run that machine, if you will, moving toward a world where that machine is fully automated. >> What exactly are you abstracting? Is it sort of the deployment model or, you know, are you able to abstract, I'm just making this up like Azure functions and GCP functions so that you can sort of run them, you know, with a consistent experience. What exactly are you abstracting and how difficult was it to achieve that objective technically? >> that's a good question. What we're abstracting is the Kubernetes node construct. That is to say a cluster of Kubernetes nodes which are typically VMs, although they can run bare metal in certain contexts, is something that typically to stand up requires knowledge of the underlying cloud provider. So for example, with GCP, you would use GKE to set up a Kubernetes cluster, and in Azure, you'd use AKS. We are actually abstracting that aspect of things so that the developers standing up applications don't have to know what the underlying cluster management provider is. They don't have to know if it's GCP, AKS or our own Walmart private cloud. Now, in terms of functions like Azure functions that you've mentioned there, we haven't done that yet. That's another piece that we have sort of on our radar screen that, we'd like to get to is serverless approach, and the Knative work from Google and the Azure functions, those are things that we see good opportunity to use for a whole variety of use cases. But right now we're not doing much with that. We're strictly container based right now, and we do have some VMs that are running in sort of more of a traditional model. So our stateful workloads are primarily VM based, but for serverless, that's an opportunity for us to take some of these stateless workloads and turn them into cloud functions. >> Well, and that's another cost lever that you can pull down the road that's going to drop right to the bottom line. Do you see a day or maybe you're doing it today, but I'd be surprised, but where you build applications that actually span multiple clouds or is there, in your view, always going to be a direct one-to-one mapping between where an application runs and the specific cloud platform? >> That's a really great question. Well, yes and no. So today, application development teams choose a cloud provider to deploy to and a location to deploy to, and they have to get involved in moving an application like we talked about today. That said, the bursting capability that I mentioned previously is something that is a step in the direction of automatic migration. That is to say we're migrating workload to different locations automatically. Currently, the prototypes we've been developing and that we think are going to eventually make their way into production are leveraging Istio to assess the load incoming on a particular cluster and start shedding that load into a different location. Right now, the configuration of that is still manual, but there's another opportunity for automation there. And I think a key piece of this is that down the road, well, that's a, sort of a small step in the direction of an application being multi provider. We expect to see really an abstraction of the fact that there is a triplet even. So the workloads are moving around according to whatever the control plane decides is necessary based on a whole variety of inputs. And at that point, you will have true multi-cloud applications, applications that are distributed across the different providers and in a way that application developers don't have to think about. >> So Walmart's been a leader, Jack, in using data for competitive advantages for decades. It's kind of been a poster child for that. You've got a mountain of IP in the form of data, tools, applications best practices that until the cloud came out was all On Prem. But I'm really interested in this idea of building a Walmart ecosystem, which obviously you have. Do you see a day or maybe you're even doing it today where you take what we call the Walmart SuperCloud, WCNP in your words, and point or turn that toward an external world or your ecosystem, you know, supporting those partners or customers that could drive new revenue streams, you know directly from the platform? >> Great questions, Dave. So there's really two things to say here. The first is that with respect to data, our data workloads are primarily VM basis. I've mentioned before some VMware, some straight open stack. But the key here is that WCNP and Kubernetes are very powerful for stateless workloads, but for stateful workloads tend to be still climbing a bit of a growth curve in the industry. So our data workloads are not primarily based on WCNP. They're VM based. Now that said, there is opportunity to make some progress there, and we are looking at ways to move things into containers that are currently running in VMs which are stateful. The other question you asked is related to how we expose data to third parties and also functionality. Right now we do have in-house, for our own use, a very robust data architecture, and we have followed the sort of domain-oriented data architecture guidance from Martin Fowler. And we have data lakes in which we collect data from all the transactional systems and which we can then use and do use to build models which are then used in our applications. But right now we're not exposing the data directly to customers as a product. That's an interesting direction that's been talked about and may happen at some point, but right now that's internal. What we are exposing to customers is applications. So we're offering our global integrated fulfillment capabilities, our order picking and curbside pickup capabilities, and our cloud powered checkout capabilities to third parties. And this means we're standing up our own internal applications as externally facing SaaS applications which can serve our partners' customers. >> Yeah, of course, Martin Fowler really first introduced to the world Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh concept and this whole idea of data products and domain oriented thinking. Zhamak Dehghani, by the way, is a speaker at our event as well. Last question I had is edge, and how you think about the edge? You know, the stores are an edge. Are you putting resources there that sort of mirror this this triplet model? Or is it better to consolidate things in the cloud? I know there are trade-offs in terms of latency. How are you thinking about that? >> All really good questions. It's a challenging area as you can imagine because edges are subject to disconnection, right? Or reduced connection. So we do place the same architecture at the edge. So WCNP runs at the edge, and an application that's designed to run at WCNP can run at the edge. That said, there are a number of very specific considerations that come up when running at the edge, such as the possibility of disconnection or degraded connectivity. And so one of the challenges we have faced and have grappled with and done a good job of I think is dealing with the fact that applications go offline and come back online and have to reconnect and resynchronize, the sort of online offline capability is something that can be quite challenging. And we have a couple of application architectures that sort of form the two core sets of patterns that we use. One is an offline/online synchronization architecture where we discover that we've come back online, and we understand the differences between the online dataset and the offline dataset and how they have to be reconciled. The other is a message-based architecture. And here in our health and wellness domain, we've developed applications that are queue based. So they're essentially business processes that consist of multiple steps where each step has its own queue. And what that allows us to do is devote whatever bandwidth we do have to those pieces of the process that are most latency sensitive and allow the queue lengths to increase in parts of the process that are not latency sensitive, knowing that they will eventually catch up when the bandwidth is restored. And to put that in a little bit of context, we have fiber lengths to all of our locations, and we have I'll just use a round number, 10-ish thousand locations. It's larger than that, but that's the ballpark, and we have fiber to all of them, but when the fiber is disconnected, When the disconnection happens, we're able to fall back to 5G and to Starlink. Starlink is preferred. It's a higher bandwidth. 5G if that fails. But in each of those cases, the bandwidth drops significantly. And so the applications have to be intelligent about throttling back the traffic that isn't essential, so that it can push the essential traffic in those lower bandwidth scenarios. >> So much technology to support this amazing business which started in the early 1960s. Jack, unfortunately, we're out of time. I would love to have you back or some members of your team and drill into how you're using open source, but really thank you so much for explaining the approach that you've taken and participating in SuperCloud2. >> You're very welcome, Dave, and we're happy to come back and talk about other aspects of what we do. For example, we could talk more about the data lakes and the data mesh that we have in place. We could talk more about the directions we might go with serverless. So please look us up again. Happy to chat. >> I'm going to take you up on that, Jack. All right. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the Cube community. Keep it right there for more action from SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here. We're exploring all the new Supercloud trends around multiple clouds, hyper scale gaps in their systems, new innovations, new applications, new companies, new products, new brands emerging from this big inflection point. Got a great guest who's going to unpack it with me today, Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, CUBE alumni. Ramesh, legend in the industry, you've been around. You've seen many cycles. Welcome to Supercloud2. >> Thank you. You're being too kind. >> Well, you know, you guys have been a technical, great technical founding team, multiple ventures, multiple times around the track as they say, but now we're seeing something completely different. This is our second event, kind of we're doing to start the the ball rolling around unpacking this idea of Supercloud which evolved from a riff with me and Dave to now a working group paper, multiple definitions. People are saying they're Supercloud. CloudFlare says this is their version. Someone says there over there. Fitzi over there in the blog is always, you know, challenging us on our definitions, but it's, the consensus is though something's happening. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> And what's your take on this kind of big inflection point? >> Absolutely, so if you just look at kind of this in layers right, so you have hyper scalers that are innovating really quickly on underlying capabilities, and then you have enterprises adopting these technologies, right, there is a layer in the middle that I would say is largely missing, right? And one that addresses the gaps introduced by these new capabilities, by the hyper scalers. At the same time, one that actually spans, let's say multiple regions, multiple clouds and so forth. So that to me is kind of the Supercloud layer of sorts. One that helps enterprises adopt the underlying hyper scaler capabilities a lot faster, and at the same time brings a certain level of consistency and homogeneity also. >> What do you think the big driver of Supercloud is? Is it the industry growing up or is it the demand for new kinds of capabilities or both? Or just evolution? What's your take? >> I would say largely it depends on kind of who the entity is that you're talking about, right? And so I would say both. So if you look at one cohort here, it's adoption, right? If I have a externally facing digital presence, for example, then I'm going to scale that up and get to as many subscribers and users no matter what, right? And at that time it's a different set of problems. If you're looking at kind of traditional enterprise inward that are bringing apps into the cloud and so forth, it's a different set of care abouts, right? So both are, I would say, equally important problems to solve for. >> Well, one reality that we're definitely tracking, and it's not really a debate anymore, is hybrid. >> Ramesh: Yep >> Hybrid happened. It happened faster than most people thought. But, you know, we were talking about this in 2015 when it first got kicked around, but now you see hybrid in the cloud, on premises and the edge. This kind of forms that distributed computing paradigm that we've always been predicting. And so if that continues to play out the way it is, you're now going to have a completely distributed, connected internet and sets of systems, intra and external within companies. So again, the world is connected 100%. Everything's changing, right? >> And that introduces. >> It wasn't your grandfather's networking anymore or storage. The game is still the same, but the play, the components are acting differently. What's your take on this? >> Absolutely. No, absolutely. That's a very key important point, and it's one that we always ask our customers right at the front end, right? Because your starting assumptions matter. If you have workloads of workloads in the cloud and data center is something that you want to connect into, then you'll make decisions kind of keeping cloud in the center and then kind of bolt on technologies for what that means to extend it to the data center. If your center of gravity is in the data center, and then cloud is let's say 10% right now, but you see that growing, then what choices do you have? Right, do you want to bring your data center technologies into the cloud because you want that consistency in operations? Or do you want to start off fresh, right? So this is a really key, important question, and one that many of our customers are actually are grappling with, right? They have this notion that going cloud native is the right approach, but at the same time that means I have a bifurcation in kind of how do I operate my data center versus my cloud, right? Two different operating models, and slowly it'll shift over to one. But you're going to have to deal with dual reality for a while. >> I was talking to an old friend of mine, CIO, very experienced CIO. Big time company, large deployment, a lot of IT. I said, so what's the big trend everyone's telling me about IT's going. He goes no, not really. IT's not going away for me. It's going everywhere in the company. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> So I need to scale my IT-like capabilities everywhere and then make it invisible. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> Which is essentially code words for saying it's going to be completely cloud native everywhere. This is what is happening. Do you agree? >> Absolutely right, and so if you look at what do enterprises care about it? The reason to go to the cloud is to get speed of operations, and it's apps, apps, apps, right? Do you ever have a conversation on networking and infrastructure first? No, that kind of gets brought into the conversation because you want to deal with users, applications and services, right? And so the end goal is essentially how do users communicate with apps and get the right experience, security and whatnot, and how do apps talk to each other and make sure that you get all of the connectivity and security requirements? Underneath the covers, what does this mean for infrastructure, networking, security and whatnot? It's actually going to be someone else's job, right? And you shouldn't have to think too much about it. So this whole notion of kind of making that transparent is real actually, right? But at the same time, us and all the guys that we talk to on the customer side, that's their job, right? Like we have to work towards making that transparent. Some are going to be in the form of capability, some are going to be driven by data, but that's really where the two worlds are going to come together. >> Lots of debates going on. We just heard from Bob Muglia here on Supercloud2. He said Supercloud's a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question that's being debated is is Supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> Okay, that's a tough one actually. I'm going to side on the side on kind of the platform side right, and the reason for that is architectural choices are things that you make ahead of time. And you, once you're in, there really isn't a fork in the road, right? Platforms continue to evolve. You can iterate, innovate and so on and so forth. And so I'm thinking Supercloud is more of a platform because you do have a choice. Hey, am I going AWS, Azure, GCP. You make that choice. What is my center of gravity? You make that choice. That's kind of an architectural decision, right? Once you make that, then how do I make things work consistently across like two or three clouds? That's a platform choice. >> So who's responsible for the architecture as the platform, the vendor serving the platform or is the platform vendor agnostic? >> You know, this is where you have to kind of peel the onion in layers, right? If you talk about applications, you can't go to a developer team or an app team and say I want you to operate on Google or AWS. They're like I'll pick the cloud that I want, right? Now who are we talking to? The infrastructure guys and the networking guys, right? They want to make sure that it's not bifurcated. It's like, hey, I want to make sure whatever I build for AWS I can equally use that on Azure. I can equally use that on GCP. So if you're talking to more of the application centric teams who really want infrastructure to be transparent, they'll say, okay, I want to make this choice of whether this is AWS, Azure, GCP, and stick to that. And if you come kind of down the layers of the stack into infrastructure, they are thinking a little more holistically, a little more Supercloud, a little more multicloud, and that. >> That's a good point. So that brings up the deployment question. >> Ramesh: Exactly! >> I want to ask you the next question, okay, what is the preferred deployment in your opinion for a Supercloud narrative? Is it single instance, spread it around everywhere? What's the, do you have a single global instance or do you have everything synchronized? >> So I would say first layer of that Supercloud really kind of fix the holes that have been introduced as a result of kind of adopting the hyper scaler technologies, right? So each, the hyper scalers have been really good at innovating and providing really massive scale elastic capabilities, right? But once you start to build capabilities on top of that to help serve the application, there's a few holes start to show up. So first job of Supercloud really is to plug those holes, right? Second is can I get to an operating model, so that I can replicate this not just in a single region, but across multiple regions, same cloud, and then across multiple clouds, right? And so both of those need to be solved for in order to be (cross talking). >> So is that multiple instantiations of the stack or? >> Yeah, so this again depends on kind of the capability, right? So if you take a more solution view, and so I can speak for kind of networking security combined right? There you always take a solution view. You don't ever look at, you know, what does this mean for a single instance in a single region. You take a macro view, and then you then break it down into what does this mean for region, what does it mean for instance, what does this mean for AZs? And so on and so forth. So you kind of have to go top to bottom. >> Okay, welcome you down into the trap now. Okay, synchronizing the data, latency, these are all questions. So what does the network Supercloud look like to you? Because networking is big here. >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> This is what you guys do. >> Exactly, yeah. So the different set of problems as you go up the stack, right? So if you have hundreds of workloads in a single region, the set of problems you're dealing with there are kind of app native connectivity, how do I go from kind of east/west, all of those fun things, right? Which are usually bound in terms of latency. You don't have those challenges as much, but can you build your entire enterprise application architecture in one region? No, you're going to have to create multiple instances, right? So my data lake is invariably going to be in one place. My business logic is going to be spread across a few places. What does that bring in? I need to go across regions. Am I going to put those two regions right next to each other? No, I'm not going to, right? I'm going to have places in Europe. I'm going to have APAC, and I'm going to have a North American presence, and I need to bring all these things together. So this is where, back to your point, latency really matters, right? Because I need to be able to find out not just best path but also how do I reduce the millisecond, microseconds that my application cares about, which brings in a layer of optimization and then so on and so on and so forth. So this is what we call kind of to borrow the Prosimo language full stack networking, right? Because I'm not just dealing with how do I go from one region to another because that's laws of physics. I can only control so much. But there are a few elements up the application stack in software that you can tweak to actually bring these things closer and closer. >> And on that point, you're seeing security being talked a lot more at the network layer. So how do you secure the Supercloud at the network layer? What's that look like? >> Yeah, we've been grappling with essentially is security kind of foundational, and then is the network on top. And then we had an alternative viewpoint which is kind of network and then security on top. And the answer is actually it's neither, right? It's almost like a meshed up sandwich of sorts. So you need to have networking security work really well together, right? Case in point, I mean we were talking to a customer yesterday. He said, hey, I have my data lake in one region that needs to talk to an analytics service in a completely different region of a different cloud. These two things just need to be able to talk to each other, which means I need to bring elements of networking. I need to bring elements of security, secure access, app segmentation, all of those things. Very simple, I have an analytics service that needs to contact a data lake. That's what he starts with, but then before you know it, it actually brings up a whole stack underneath, so that's. >> VMware calls that cloud chaos. >> Ramesh: Yes, exactly. >> And then that's the halfway point between cloud smart. Cloud first, cloud chaos, cloud smart, and the next thing, you can skip that whole step. But again, again, it's pick your strategy right? Again, this comes back down to your earlier point. I want to ask you from a customer standpoint, you got the hyper scalers doing very, very well. >> Ramesh: Yep, absolutely. >> And I love what their Amazon's doing. I think Microsoft again though they had a little bit of downgrade are catching up fast, and they have their installed base. So you got the land of the installed bases. >> Correct. >> First and greater, better cloud. Install base getting better, almost as good, almost as good is a gift, but close. Now you have them specializing. Silicon, special silicon. So there's gaps for other services. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky's a open book saying, hey, we want our ecosystem to pick up these gaps and build on them. Go ahead, go to town. >> So this is where I think choices are tough, right? Because if you had one choice, you would work with it, and you would work around it, right? Now I have five different choices. Now what do I do? Our viewpoint is there are a bunch of things that say AWS does really, really well. Use that as a foundational layer, right? Like don't reinvent the wheel on those things. Transit gateways, global accelerators and whatnot, they exist for a reason. Billions of dollars have gone into building those things. Use that foundational layer, right? But what you want to build on top of that is actually driven by the application. The requirements of a lambda application that's serverless, it's very different than a packaged application that's responding for transactions, right? Like it's just completely very, very different. And so bring in the right set of capabilities required for those set of applications, and then you go based on that. This is also where I think whether something is a regional construct versus an overall global construct really, really matters, right? Because if you start with the assumption that everything is going to be built regionally, then it's someone else's job to make sure that all of these things are connected. But if you start with kind of the global purview, then the rest of them start to (cross talking). >> What are some of the things that the enterprises might want that are gaps that are going to be filled by the, by startups like you guys and the ecosystem because we're seeing the ecosystem form into two big camps. >> Ramesh: Yep. >> ISVs, which is an old school definition of independent software vendor, aka someone who writes software. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> SaaS app. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And then ecosystem software players that were once ISVs now have people building on top of them. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> They're building on top of the cloud. So you have that new hyper scale effect going on. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got ISVs, which is software developers, software vendors. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And ecosystems. >> Yep. >> What's that impact of that? Cause it's a new dynamic. >> Exactly, so if you take kind of enterprises, want to make sure that that their apps and the data center migrate to the cloud, new apps are developed the right way in the cloud, right? So that's kind of table stakes. So now what choices do they have? They listen to AWS and say, okay, I have all these cloud native services. I want to be able to instantiate all that. Now comes the interesting choice that they have to make. Do I go hire a whole bunch of people and do it myself or do I go there on the platform route, right? Because I made an architectural choice. Now I have to decide whether I want to do this myself or the platform choice. DIY works great for some, but you don't know what you're getting into, and it's people involved, right? People, process, all those fun things involved, right? So we show up there and say, you don't know what you don't know, right? Like because that's the nature of it. Why don't you invest in a platform like what what we provide, and then you actually build on top of it. We will, it's our job to make sure that we keep up with the innovation happening underneath the covers. And at the same time, this is not a closed ended system. You can actually build on top of our platform, right? And so that actually gives you a good mix. Now the care abouts are interesting. Some apps care about experience. Some apps care about latency. Some apps are extremely charty and extremely data intensive, but nobody wants to pay for it, right? And so it's a interesting Jenga that you have to play between experience versus security versus cost, right? And that makes kind of head of infrastructure and cloud platform teams' life really, really, really interesting. >> And this is why I love your background, and Stu Miniman, when he was with theCUBE, and now he's at Red Hat, we used to riff about the network and how network folks are now, those concepts are now up the top of the stack because the cloud is one big network effect. >> Ramesh: Exactly, correct. >> It's a computer. >> Yep, absolutely. No, and case in point, right, like say we're in let's say in San Jose here or or Palo Alto here, and let's say my application is sitting in London, right? The cloud gives you different express lanes. I can go down to my closest pop location provided by AWS and then I can go ride that all the way up to up to London. It's going to give me better performance, low latency, but I'm going to have to incur some costs associated with it. Or I can go all the wild internet all the way from Palo Alta up to kind of the ingress point into London and then go access, but I'm spending time on the wild internet, which means all kinds of fun things happen, right? But I'm not paying much, but my experience is not going to be so great. So, and there are various degrees of shade in them, of gray in the middle, right? So how do you pick what? It all kind of is driven by the applications. >> Well, we certainly want you back for Supercloud3, our next version of this virtual/live event here in our Palo Alto studios. Really appreciate you coming on. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, give a quick plug for the company. Next minute, we can take a minute to talk about the success of the company. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> I know you got a fresh financing this past year. Plenty of money in the bank, going to ride this new wave, Supercloud wave. Give us a quick plug. >> Absolutely, yeah. So three years going on to four this calendar year. So it's an interesting time for the company. We have proven that our technology, product and our initial customers are quite happy with it. Now comes essentially more of those and scale and so forth. That's kind of the interesting phase that we are in. Also heartened to see quite a few of kind of really large and dominant players in the market, partners, channels and so forth, invest in us to take this to the next set of customers. I would say there's been a dramatic shift in the conversation with our customers. The first couple of years or so of the company, we are about three years old right now, was really about us educating them. This is what you need. This is what you need. Now actually it's a lot of just pull, right? We've seen a good indication, as much as a hate RFIs, a good indication is the number of RFIs that show up at our door saying we want you to participate in this because we want to understand more, right? And so as a, I think we are at an interesting point of the, of that shift. >> RFIs always like do all this work and hope for the best. Pray for a deal. You know, you guys on the right side of history. If a customer asks with respect to Supercloud, multicloud, is that your focus? Is that the direction you guys are going into? >> Yeah, so I would say we are kind of both, right? Supercloud and multicloud because we, our customers are hybrid, multiple clouds, all of the above, right? Our main pitch and kind of value back to the customers is go embrace cloud native because that's the right approach, right? It doesn't make sense to go reinvent the wheel on that one, but then make a really good choice about whether you want to do this yourself or invest in a platform to make your life easy. Because we have seen this story play out with many many enterprises, right? They pick the right technologies. They do a simple POC overnight, and they say, yeah, I can make this work for two apps, right? And then they say, yes, I can make this work for 100. You go down a certain path. You hit a wall. You hit a wall, and it's a hard wall. It's like, no, there isn't a thing that you can go around it. >> A lot of dead bodies laying around. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> Dead wall. >> And then they have to unravel around that, and then they come talk to us, and they say, okay, now what? Like help me, help me through this journey. So I would say to the extent that you can do this diligence ahead of time, do that, and then, and then pick the right platform. >> You've got to have the talent. And you got to be geared up. You got to know what you're getting into. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got to have the staff to do this. >> And cloud talent and skillset in particular, I mean there's lots available but it's in pockets right? And if you look at kind of web three companies, they've gone and kind of amassed all those guys, right? So enterprises are not left with the cream of the crop. >> John: They might be coming back. >> Exactly, exactly, so. >> With this downturn. Ramesh, great to see you and thanks for contributing to Supercloud2, and again, love your team. Very technical team, and you're in the right side of history in this one. Congratulations. >> Ramesh: No, and thank you, thank you very much. >> Okay, this is Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(intro music plays) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante, here in our Palo Alto Studio, with a live performance all day unpacking the wave of Supercloud. This is our second edition. Back for keynote review here is Vittorio Viarengo, talking about the hype and the reality of the Supercloud momentum. Vittorio, great to see you. You got a presentation. Looking forward to hearing the update. >> It's always great to be here on this stage with you guys. >> John Furrier: (chuckles) So the business imperative for cloud right now is clear and the Supercloud wave points to the builders and they want to break through. VMware, you guys have a lot of builders in the ecosystem. Where do you guys see multicloud today? What's going on? >> So, what we see is, when we talk with our customers is that customers are in a state of cloud chaos. Raghu Raghuram, our CEO, introduced this term at our user conference and it really resonated with our customers. And the chaos comes from the fact that most enterprises have applications spread across private cloud, multiple hyperscalers, and the edge increasingly. And so with that, every hyperscaler brings their own vertical integrated stack of infrastructure development, platform security, and so on and so forth. And so our customers are left with a ballooning cost because they have to train their employees across multiple stacks. And the costs are only going up. >> John Furrier: Have you talked about the Supercloud with your customers? What are they looking for when they look at the business value of Cross-Cloud Services? Why are they digging into it? What are some of the reasons? >> First of all, let's put this in perspective. 90, 87% of customers use two or more cloud including the private cloud. And 55%, get this, 55% use three or more clouds, right? And so, when you talk to these customers they're all asking for two things. One, they find that managing the multicloud is more difficult than the private cloud. And that goes without saying because it's new, they don't have the skills, and they have many of these. And pretty much everybody, 87% of them, are seeing their cost getting out of control. And so they need a new approach. We believe that the industry needs a new approach to solving the multicloud problem, which you guys have introduced and you call it the Supercloud. We call it Cross-Cloud Services. But the idea is that- and the parallel goes back to the private cloud. In the private cloud, if you remember the old days, before we called it the private cloud, we would install SAP. And the CIO would go, "Oh, I hear SAP works great on HP hardware. Oh, let's buy the HP stack", right? (hosts laugh) And then you go, "Oh, oh, Oracle databases. They run phenomenally on Sun Stack." That's another stack. And it wasn't sustainable, right? And so, VMware came in with virtualization and made everything look the same. And we unleashed a tremendous era of growth and speed and cost saving for our customers. So we believe, and I think the industry also believes, if you look at the success of Supercloud, first instance and today, that we need to create a new level of abstraction in the cloud. And this abstraction needs to be at a higher level. It needs to be built around the lingua franca of the cloud, which is Kubernetes, APIs, open source stacks. And by doing so, we're going to allow our customers to have a more unified way of building, managing, running, connecting, and securing applications across cloud. >> So where should that standardization occur? 'Cause we're going to hear from some customers today. When I ask them about cloud chaos, they're like, "Well, the way we deal with cloud chaos is MonoCloud". They sort of put on the blinders, right? But of course, they may be risking not being able to take advantage of best-of-breed. So where should that standardization layer occur across clouds? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Well, I also hear that from some customers. "Oh, we are one cloud". They are in denial. There's no question about it. In fact, when I met at our user conference with a number of CIOs, and I went around the room and I asked them, I saw the entire spectrum. (laughs) The person is in denial. "Oh, we're using AWS." I said, "Great." "And the private cloud, so we're all set." "Okay, thank you. Next." "Oh, the business units are using AWS." "Ah, okay. So you have three." "Oh, and we just bought a company that is using Google back in Europe." So, okay, so you got four right there. So that person in denial. Then, you have the second category of customers that are seeing the problem, they're ahead of the pack, and they're building their solution. We're going to hear from Walmart later today. >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> So they're building their own. Not everybody has the skills and the scale of Walmart to build their own. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> So, eventually, then you get to the third category of customers. They're actually buying solutions from one of the many ISVs that you are going to talk with today. You know, whether it is Azure Corp or Snowflake or all this. I will argue, any new company, any new ISV, is by definition a multicloud service company, right? And so these people... Or they're buying our Cross-Cloud Services to solve this problem. So that's the spectrum of customers out there. >> What's the stack you're focusing on specifically? What is VMware? Because virtualization is not going away. You're seeing a lot more in the cloud with networking, for example, this abstraction layer. What specifically are you guys focusing on? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So, I like to talk about this beyond what VMware does, just 'cause I think this is an industry movement. A market is forming around multicloud services. And so it's an approach that pretty much a whole industry is taking of building this abstraction layer. In our approach, it is to bring these services together to simplify things even further. So, initially, we were the first to see multicloud happening. You know, Raghu and Sanjay, back in what, like 2016, 17, saw this coming and our first foray in multicloud was to take this sphere and our hypervisor and port it natively on all the hyperscaling, which is a phenomenal solution to get your enterprise application in the cloud and modernize them. But then we realized that customers were already in the cloud natively. And so we had to have (all chuckle) a religion discussion internally and drop that hypervisor religion and say, "Hey, we need to go and help our customers where they are, in a native cloud". And that's where we brought back Pivotal. We built tons around it. We shifted. And then Aria. And so basically, our evolution was to go from, you know, our hypervisor to cloud native. And then eventually we ended up at what we believe is the most comprehensive multicloud services solution that covers Application Development with Tanzu, Management with Aria, and then you have NSX for security and user computing for connectivity. And so we believe that we have the most comprehensive set of integrated services to solve the challenges of multicloud, bringing excess simplicity into the picture. >> John Furrier: As some would say, multicloud and multi environment, when you get to the distributed computing with the edge, you're going to need that capability. And you guys have been very successful with private cloud. But to be devil's advocate, you guys have been great with private cloud, but some are saying like, you guys don't get public cloud yet. How do you answer that? Because there's a lot of work that you guys have done in public cloud and it seems like private cloud successes are moving up into public cloud. Like networking. You're seeing a lot of that being configured in. So the enterprise-grade solutions are moving into the cloud. So what would you say to the skeptics out there that say, "Oh, I think you got private cloud nailed down, but you don't really have public cloud." (chuckles) >> [Vittorio Viarengo] First of all, we love skeptics. Our engineering team love skeptics and love to prove them wrong. (John laughs) And I would never ever bet against our engineering team. So I believe that VMware has been so successful in building a private cloud and the technology that actually became the foundation for the public cloud. But that is always hard, to be known in a new environment, right? There's always that period where you have to prove yourself. But what I love about VMware is that VMware has what I believe, what I like to call "enterprise pragmatism". The private cloud is not going away. So we're going to help our customers there, and then, as they move to the cloud, we are going to give them an option to adopt the cloud at their own pace, with VMware cloud, to allow them to move to the cloud and be able to rely on the enterprise-class capabilities we built on-prem in the cloud. But then with Tanzu and Aria and the rest of the Cross-Cloud Service portfolio, being able to meet them where they are. If they're already in the cloud, have them have a single place to build application, a single place to manage application, and so on and so forth. >> John Furrier: You know, Dave, we were talking in the opening. Vittorio, I want to get your reaction to this because we were saying in the opening that the market's obviously pushing this next gen. You see ChatGPT and the success of these new apps that are coming out. The business models are demanding kind of a digital transformation. The tech, the builders, are out there, and you guys have a interesting view because your customer base is almost the canary in the coal mine because this is an Operations challenge as well as just enabling the cloud native. So, I want to get your thoughts on, you know, your customer base, VMware customers. They've been in IT Ops for generations. And now, as that crowd moves and sees this Supercloud environment, it's IT again, but it's everywhere. It's not just IT in a data center. It's on-premises, it's cloud, it's edge. So, almost, your customer base is like a canary in the coal mine for this movement of how do you operationalize multiple environments? Which includes clouds, which includes apps. I mean, this is the core question. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. And I want to make this an industry conversation. Forget about VMware for a second. We believe that there are like four or five major pillars that you need to implement to create this level of abstraction. It starts from observability. If you don't know- You need to know where your apps are, where your data is, how the the applications are performing, what is the security posture, what is their performance? So then, you can do something about it. We call that the observability part of this, creating this abstraction. The second one is security. So you need to be- Sorry. Infrastructure. An infrastructure. Creating an abstraction layer for infrastructure means to be able to give the applications, and the developer who builds application, the right infrastructure for the application at the right time. Whether it is a VM, whether it's a Kubernetes cluster, or whether it's microservices, and so on and so forth. And so, that allows our developers to think about infrastructure just as code. If it is available, whatever application needs, whatever the cost makes sense for my application, right? The third part of security, and I can give you a very, very simple example. Say that I was talking to a CIO of a major insurance company in Europe and he is saying to me, "The developers went wild, built all these great front office applications. Now the business is coming to me and says, 'What is my compliance report?'" And the guy is saying, "Say that I want to implement the policy that says, 'I want to encrypt all my data no matter where it resides.' How does it do it? It needs to have somebody logging in into Amazon and configure it, then go to Google, configure it, go to the private cloud." That's time and cost, right? >> Yeah. >> So, you need to have a way to enforce security policy from the infrastructure to the app to the firewall in one place and distribute it across. And finally, the developer experience, right? Developers, developers, developers. (all laugh) We're always trying to keep up with... >> Host: You can dance if you want to do... >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah, let's not make a fool of ourselves. More than usual. Developers are the kings and queens of the hill. They are. Why? Because they build the application. They're making us money and saving us money. And so we need- And right now, they have to go into these different stacks. So, you need to give developers two things. One, a common development experience across this different Kubernetes distribution. And two, a way for the operators. To your point. The operators have fallen behind the developers. And they cannot go to the developer there and tell them, "This is how you're going to do things." They have to see how they're doing things and figure out how to bring the gallery underneath so that developers can be developers, but the operators can lay down the tracks and the infrastructure there is secure and compliant. >> Dave Vellante: So two big inferences from that. One is self-serve infrastructure. You got- In a decentralized cloud, a Supercloud world, you got to have self-serve infrastructure, you got to be simple. And the second is governance. You mentioned security, but it's also governance. You know, data sovereignty as we talked about. So the question I have, Vittorio, is where does the customer start? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So I, it always depends on the business need, but to me, the foundational layer is observability. If you don't know where your staff is, you cannot manage, you cannot secure it, you cannot manage its cost, right? So I think observability is the bar to entry. And then it depends on the business needs, right? So, we go back to the CIO that I talked to. He is clearly struggling with compliance and security. >> Hosts: Mm hmm. >> And so, like many customers. And so, that's maybe where they start. There are other customers that are a little behind the head of the pack in terms of building applications, right? And so they're looking at these, you know, innovative companies that have the developers that get the cloud and build all these application. They are leader in the industry. They're saying, "How do I get some of that?" Well, the way you get some of that is by adopting modern application development and platform operational capabilities. So, that's maybe, that's where they should start. And so on and so forth. It really depends on the business. To me, observability is the foundational part of this. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, we've been on this conversation with you for over a year and a half now with Supercloud. You've been a leader in seeing the wave, you and Raghu and the team at VMware, among other industry leaders. This is our second event. If you're- In the minute and a half that we have left, when you get asked, "what is this Supercloud multicloud Cross-Cloud thing? What's it mean?" I mean, I mentioned earlier, the market, the business models are changing, tech's changing, society needs more economic value out of the cloud. Builders are out there. If someone says, "Hey, Vittorio, what's the bottom line? What's really going on? Why should I pay attention to this wave? What's going on?" How would you describe the relevance of Supercloud? >> I think that this industry is full of smart vendors and smart customers. And if we are smart about it, we look at the history of IT and the history of IT repeats itself over and over again. You follow the- He said, "Follow the money." I say, "Follow the developers." That's how I made my career. I follow great developers. I look at, you know, Kit Colbert. I say, "Okay. I'm going to get behind that guy wherever he is going." And I try to add value to that person. I look at Raghu and all the great engineers that I was blessed to work with. And so the engineers go and explore new territories and then the rest of the stacks moves around. The developers have gone multicloud. And just like in any iteration of IT, at some point, the way you get the right scales at the right cost is with abstractions. And you can see it everywhere from, you know, bits and bytes, integration, to SOA, to APIs and microservices. You can see it now from best-of-breed hyperscaler across multiple clouds to creating an abstraction layer, a Supercloud, that creates a unified way of building, managing, running, securing, and accessing applications. So if you're a customer- (laughs) A minute and a half. (hosts chuckle) If you are customers that are out there and feeling the pain, you got to adopt this. If you are customers that is behind and saying, "Maybe you're in denial" look at the customers that are solving the problems today, and we're going to have some today. See what they're doing and learn from them so you don't make the same mistakes and you can get there ahead of it. >> Dave Vellante: Gracely's Law, John. Brian Gracely. That history repeats itself and- >> John Furrier: And I think one of these, "follow the developers" is interesting. And the other big wave, I want to get your comment real quick, is that developers aren't just application developers. They're network developers. The stack has completely been software-enabled so that you have software-defined networking, you have all kinds of software at all aspects of observability, infrastructure, security. The developers are everywhere. It's not just software. Software is everywhere. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. Developers, developers, developers. The other thing that we can tell, I can tell, and we know, because we live in Silicon Valley. We worship developers but if you are out there in manufacturing, healthcare... If you have developers that understand this stuff, pamper them, keep them happy. (hosts laugh) If you don't have them, figure out where they hang out and go recruit them because developers indeed make the IT world go round. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, thank you for coming on with that opening keynote here for Supercloud 2. We're going to unpack what Supercloud is all about in our second edition of our live performance here in Palo Alto. Virtual event. We're going to talk to customers, experts, leaders, investors, everyone who's looking at the future, what's being enabled by this new big wave coming on called Supercloud. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break. (ambient theme music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, our studio, where we're doing a live stage performance and virtually syndicating out around the world. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, my co-host with the The Cube here. We've got Kit Colbert, the CTO of VM. We're doing a keynote on Cloud Chaos, the evolution of SuperCloud Architecture Kit. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's great to be here for Supercloud 2. >> And so we're going to dig into it. We're going to do a Q&A. We're going to let you present. You got some slides. I really want to get this out there, it's really compelling story. Do the presentation and then we'll come back and discuss. Take it away. >> Yeah, well thank you. So, we had a great time at the original Supercloud event, since then, been talking to a lot of customers, and started to better formulate some of the thinking that we talked about last time So, let's jump into it. Just a few quick slides to sort of set the tone here. So, if we go to the the next slide, what that shows is the journey that we see customers on today, going from what we call Cloud First into this phase that many customers are stuck in, called Cloud Chaos, and where they want to get to, and this is the term customers actually use, we didn't make this up, we heard it from customers. This notion of Cloud Smart, right? How do they use cloud more effectively, more intelligently? Now, if you walk through this journey, customers start with Cloud First. They usually select a single cloud that they're going to standardize on, and when they do that, they have to build out a whole bunch of functionality around that cloud. Things you can see there on the screen, disaster recovery, security, how do they monitor it or govern it? Like, these are things that are non-negotiable, you've got to figure it out, and typically what they do is, they leverage solutions that are specific for that cloud, and that's fine when you have just one cloud. But if we build out here, what we see is that most customers are using more than just one, they're actually using multiple, not necessarily 10 or however many on the screen, but this is just as an example. And so what happens is, they have to essentially duplicate or replicate that stack they've built for each different cloud, and they do so in a kind of a siloed manner. This results in the Cloud Chaos term that that we talked about before. And this is where most businesses out there are, they're using two, maybe three public clouds. They've got some stuff on-prem and they've also got some stuff out at the edge. This is apps, data, et cetera. So, this is the situation, this is sort of that Cloud Chaos. So, the question is, how do we move from this phase to Cloud Smart? And this is where the architecture comes in. This is why architecture, I think, is so important. It's really about moving away from these single cloud services that just solve a problem for one cloud, to something we call a Cross-Cloud service. Something that can support a set of functionality across all clouds, and that means not just public clouds, but also private clouds, edge, et cetera, and when you evolve that across the board, what you get is this sort of Supercloud. This notion that we're talking about here, where you combine these cross-cloud services in many different categories. You can see some examples there on the screen. This is not meant to be a complete set of things, but just examples of what can be done. So, this is sort of the transition and transformation that we're talking about here, and I think the architecture piece comes in both for the individual cloud services as well as that Supercloud concept of how all those services come together. >> Great presentation., thanks for sharing. If you could pop back to that slide, on the Cloud Chaos one. I just want to get your thoughts on something there. This is like the layout of the stack. So, this slide here that I'm showing on the screen, that you presented, okay, take us through that complexity. This is the one where I wanted though, that looks like a spaghetti code mix. >> Yes. >> So, do you turn this into a Supercloud stack, right? Is that? >> well, I think it's, it's an evolving state that like, let's take one of these examples, like security. So, instead of implementing security individually in different ways, using different technologies, different tooling for each cloud, what you would do is say, "Hey, I want a single security solution that works across all clouds", right? A concrete example of this would be secure software supply chain. This is probably one of the top ones that I hear when I talk to customers. How do I know that the software I'm building is truly what I expect it to be, and not something that some hacker has gotten into, and polluted with malicious code? And what they do is that, typically today, their teams have gone off and created individual secure software supply chain solutions for each cloud. So, now they could say, "Hey, I can take a single implementation and just have different endpoints." It could go to Google, or AWS, or on-prem, or wherever have you, right? So, that's the sort of architectural evolution that we're talking about. >> You know, one of the things we hear, Dave, you've been on theCUBE all the time, and we, when we talk privately with customers who are asking us like, what's, what's going on? They have the same complaint, "I don't want to build a team, a dev team, for that stack." So, if you go back to that slide again, you'll see that, that illustrates the tech stack for the clouds and the clouds at the bottom. So, the number one complaint we hear, and I want to get your reaction to that, "I don't want to have a team to have to work on that. So, I'm going to pick one and then have a hedge secondary one, as a backup." Here, that's one, that's four, five, eight, ten, ten environments. >> Yeah, I got a lot. >> That's going to be the reality, so, what's the technical answer to that? >> Yeah, well first of all, let me just say, this picture is again not totally representative of reality oftentimes, because while that picture shows a solution for every cloud, oftentimes that's not the case. Oftentimes it's a line of business going off, starting to use a new cloud. They might solve one or two things, but usually not security, usually not some of these other things, right? So, I think from a technical standpoint, where you want to get to is, yes, that sort of common service, with a common operational team behind it, that is trained on that, that can work across clouds. And that's really I think the important evolution here, is that you don't need to replicate these operational teams, one for each cloud. You can actually have them more focused across all those clouds. >> Yeah, in fact, we were commenting on the opening today. Dave and I were talking about the benefits of the cloud. It's heterogeneous, which is a good thing, but it's complex. There's skill gaps and skill required, but at the end of the day, self-service of the cloud, and the elastic nature of it makes it the benefit. So, if you try to create too many common services, you lose the value of the cloud. So, what's the trade off, in your mind right now as customers start to look at okay, identity, maybe I'll have one single sign on, that's an obvious one. Other ones? What are the areas people are looking at from a combination, common set of services? Where do they start? What's the choices? What are some of the trade offs? 'Cause you can't do it everything. >> No, it's a great question. So, that's actually a really good point and as I answer your question, before I answer your question, the important point about that, as you saw here, you know, across cloud services or these set of Cross-Cloud services, the things that comprise the Supercloud, at least in my view, the point is not necessarily to completely abstract the underlying cloud. The point is to give a business optionality and choice, in terms of what it wants to abstract, and I think that gets to your question, is how much do you actually want to abstract from the underlying cloud? Now, what I find, is that typically speaking, cloud choice is driven at least from a developer or app team perspective, by the best of breed services. What higher level application type services do you need? A database or AI, you know, ML systems, for your application, and that's going to drive your choice of the cloud. So oftentimes, businesses I talk to, want to allow those services to shine through, but for other things that are not necessarily highly differentiated and yet are absolutely critical to creating a successful application, those are things that you want to standardize. Again, like things like security, the supply chain piece, cost management, like these things you need to, and you know, things like cogs become really, really important when you start operating at scale. So, those are the things in it that I see people wanting to focus on. >> So, there's a majority model. >> Yes. >> All right, and we heard of earlier from Walmart, who's fairly, you know, advanced, but at the same time their supercloud is pretty immature. So, what are you seeing in terms of supercloud momentum, crosscloud momentum? What's the starting point for customers? >> Yeah, so it's interesting, right, on that that three-tiered journey that I talked about, this Cloud Smart notion is, that is adoption of what you might call a supercloud or architecture, and most folks aren't there yet. Even the really advanced ones, even the really large ones, and I think it's because of the fact that, we as an industry are still figuring this out. We as an industry did not realize this sort of Cloud Chaos state could happen, right? We didn't, I think most folks thought they could standardize on one cloud and that'd be it, but as time has shown, that's simply not the case. As much as one might try to do that, that's not where you end up. So, I think there's two, there's two things here. Number one, for folks that are early in to the cloud, and are in this Cloud Chaos phase, we see the path out through standardization of these cross-cloud services through adoption of this sort of supercloud architecture, but the other thing I think is particularly exciting, 'cause I talked to a number of of businesses who are not yet in the Cloud Chaos phase. They're earlier on in the cloud journey, and I think the opportunity there is that they don't have to go through Cloud Chaos. They can actually skip that whole phase if they adopt this supercloud architecture from the beginning, and I think being thoughtful around that is really the key here. >> It's interesting, 'cause we're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals later, and they, yes there are multiple clouds, but the multiple clouds are largely separate, and so it's a business unit using that. So, they're not in Cloud Chaos, but they're not tapping the advantages that you could get for best of breed across those business units. So, to your point, they have an opportunity to actually build that architecture or take advantage of those cross-cloud services, prior to reaching cloud chaos. >> Well, I, actually, you know, I'd love to hear from them if, 'cause you say they're not in Cloud Chaos, but are they, I mean oftentimes I find that each BU, each line of business may feel like they're fine, in of themselves. >> Yes, exactly right, yes. >> But when you look at it from an overall company perspective, they're like, okay, things are pretty chaotic here. We don't have standardization, I don't, you know, like, again, security compliance, these things, especially in many regulated industries, become huge problems when you're trying to run applications across multiple clouds, but you don't have any of those company-wide standardizations. >> Well, this is a point. So, they have a big deal with AstraZeneca, who's got this huge ecosystem, they want to start sharing data across those ecosystem, and that's when they will, you know, that Cloud Chaos will, you know, come, come to fore, you would think. I want to get your take on something that Bob Muglia said earlier, which is, he kind of said, "Hey Dave, you guys got to tighten up your definition a little bit." So, he said a supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So, you know, thank you, that was nice and simple. However others in the community, we're going to hear from Dr. Nelu Mihai later, says, no, no, wait a minute, it's got to be an architecture, not a platform. Where do you land on this architecture v. platform thing? >> I look at it as, I dunno if it's, you call it maturity or just kind of a time horizon thing, but for me when I hear the word platform, I typically think of a single vendor. A single vendor provides this platform. That's kind of the beauty of a platform, is that there is a simplicity usually consistency to it. >> They did the architecture. (laughing) >> Yeah, exactly but I mean, well, there's obviously architecture behind it, has to be, but you as a customer don't necessarily need to deal with that. Now, I think one of the opportunities with Supercloud is that it's not going to be, or there is no single vendor that can solve all these problems. It's got to be the industry coming together as a community, inter-operating, working together, and so, that's why, for me, I think about it as an architecture, that there's got to be these sort of, well-defined categories of functionality. There's got to be well-defined interfaces between those categories of functionality to enable modularity, to enable businesses to be able to pick and choose the right sorts of services, and then weave those together into an overall supercloud. >> Okay, so you're not pitching, necessarily the platform, you're saying, hey, we have an architecture that's open. I go back to something that Vittorio said on August 9th, with the first Supercloud, because as well, remember we talked about abstracting, but at the same time giving developers access to those primitives. So he said, and this, I think your answer sort of confirms this. "I want to have my cake eat it too and not gain weight." >> (laughing) Right. Well and I think that's where the platform aspect can eventually come, after we've gotten aligned architecture, you're going to start to naturally see some vendors step up to take on some of the remaining complexity there. So, I do see platforms eventually emerging here, but I think where we have to start as an industry is around aligning, okay, what does this definition mean? What does that architecture look like? How do we enable interoperability? And then we can take the next step. >> Because it depends too, 'cause I would say Snowflake has a platform, and they've just defined the architecture, but we're not talking about infrastructure here, obviously, we're talking about something else. >> Well, I think that the Snowflake talks about, what he talks about, security and data, you're going to start to see the early movement around areas that are very spanning oriented, and I think that's the beginning of the trend and I think there's going to be a lot more, I think on the infrastructure side. And to your point about the platform architecture, that's actually a really good thought exercise because it actually makes you think about what you're designing in the first place, and that's why I want to get your reaction. >> Quote from- >> Well I just have to interrupt since, later on, you're going to hear from near Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Network. He says architecture and security historically, they don't go hand in hand, 'cause it's a big mess. >> It depends if you're whacking the mole or you actually proactively building something. Well Kit, I want to get your reaction from a quote from someone in our community who said about Supercloud, you know, "The Supercloud's great, there are issues around computer science rigors, and customer requirements." So, there's some issues around the science itself as well as not just listen to the customer, 'cause if that's the case, we'd have a better database, a better Oracle, right, so, but there's other, this tech involved, new tech. We need an open architecture with universal data modeling interconnecting among them, connectivity is a part of security, and then, once we get through that gate, figuring out the technical, the data, and the customer requirements, they say "Supercloud should be a loosely coupled platform with open architecture, plug and play, specialized services, ready for optimization, automation that can stand the test of time." What's your reaction to that sentiment? You like it, is that, does that sound good? >> Yeah, no, broadly aligns with my thinking, I think, and what I see from talking with customers as well. I mean, I like the, again, the, you know, listening to customer needs, prioritizing those things, focusing on some of the connective tissue networking, and data and some of these aspects talking about the open architecture, the interoperability, those are all things I think are absolutely critical. And then, yeah, like I think at the end. >> On the computer science side, do you see some science and engineering things that need to be engineered differently? We heard databases are radically going to change and that are inadequate for the new architecture. What are some of the things like that, from a science standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the more academic research type things. >> More tech, or more better tech or is it? >> Yeah, look, absolutely. I mean I think that there's a bunch around, certainly around the data piece, around, you know, there's issues of data gravity, data mobility. How do you want to do that in a way that's performant? There's definitely issues around security as well. Like how do you enable like trust in these environments, there's got to be some sort of hardware rooted trusts, and you know, a whole bunch of various types of aspects there. >> So, a lot of work still be done. >> Yes, I think so. And that's why I look at this as, this is not a one year thing, or you know, it's going to be multi-years, and I think again, it's about all of us in the industry working together to come to an aligned picture of what that looks like. >> So, as the world's moved from private cloud to public cloud and now Cross-cloud services, supercloud, metacloud, whatever you want to call it, how have you sort of changed the way engineering's organized, developers sort of approached the problem? Has it changed and how? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's funny, we at VMware, going through the same challenges as our customers and you know, any business, right? We use multiple clouds, we got a big, of course, on-prem footprint. You know, what we're doing is similar to what I see in many other customers, which, you see the evolution of a platform team, and so the platform team is really in charge of trying to develop a lot of these underlying services to allow our lines of business, our product teams, to be able to move as quickly as possible, to focus on the building, while we help with a lot of the operational overheads, right? We maintain security, compliance, all these other things. We also deal with, yeah, just making the developer's life as simple as possible. So, they do need to know some stuff about, you know, each public cloud they're using, those public cloud services, but at the same, time we can abstract a lot of the details they don't need to be in. So, I think this sort of delineation or separation, I should say, between the underlying platform team and the product teams is a very, very common pattern. >> You know, I noticed the four layers you talked about were observability, infrastructure, security and developers, on that slide, the last slide you had at the top, that was kind of the abstraction key areas that you guys at VMware are working? >> Those were just some groupings that we've come up with, but we like to debate them. >> I noticed data's in every one of them. >> Yeah, yep, data is key. >> It's not like, so, back to the data questions that security is called out as a pillar. Observability is just kind of watching everything, but it's all pretty much data driven. Of the four layers that you see, I take that as areas that you can. >> Standardize. >> Consistently rely on to have standard services. >> Yes. >> Which one do you start with? What's the, is there order of operations? >> Well, that's, I mean. >> 'Cause I think infrastructure's number one, but you had observability, you need to know what's going on. >> Yeah, well it really, it's highly dependent. Again, it depends on the business that we talk to and what, I mean, it really goes back to, what are your business priorities, right? And we have some customers who may want to get out of a data center, they want to evacuate the data center, and so what they want is then, consistent infrastructure, so they can just move those applications up to the cloud. They don't want to have to refactor them and we'll do it later, but there's an immediate and sort of urgent problem that they have. Other customers I talk to, you know, security becomes top of mind, or maybe compliance, because they're in a regulated industry. So, those are the sort of services they want to prioritize. So, I would say there is no single right answer, no one size fits all. The point about this architecture is really around the optionality of it, as it allows you as a business to decide what's most important and where you want to prioritize. >> How about the deployment models kit? Do, does a customer have that flexibility from a deployment model standpoint or do I have to, you know, approach it a specific way? Can you address that? >> Yeah, I mean deployment models, you're talking about how they how they consume? >> So, for instance, yeah, running a control plane in the cloud. >> Got it, got it. >> And communicating elsewhere or having a single global instance or instantiating that instance, and? >> So, that's a good point actually, and you know, the white paper that we released back in August, around this sort of concept, the Cross-cloud service. This is some of the stuff we need to figure out as an industry. So, you know when we talk about a Cross-cloud service, we can mean actually any of the things you just talked about. It could be a single instance that runs, let's say in one public cloud, but it supports all of 'em. Or it could be one that's multi-instance and that runs in each of the clouds, and that customers can take dependencies on whichever one, depending on what their use cases are or the, even going further than that, there's a type of Cross-cloud service that could actually be instantiated even in an air gapped or offline environment, and we have many, many businesses, especially heavily regulated ones that have that requirement, so I think, you know. >> Global don't forget global, regions, locales. >> Yeah, there's all sorts of performance latency issues that can be concerned about. So, most services today are the former, there are single sort of instance or set of instances within a single cloud that support multiple clouds, but I think what we're doing and where we're going with, you know, things like what we see with Kubernetes and service meshes and all these things, will better enable folks to hit these different types of cross-cloud service architectures. So, today, you as a customer probably wouldn't have too much choice, but where we're going, you'll see a lot more choice in the future. >> If you had to summarize for folks watching the importance of Supercloud movement, multi-cloud, cross-cloud services, as an industry in flexible, 'cause I'm always riffing on the whole old school network protocol stacks that got disrupted by TCP/IP, that's a little bit dated, we got people on the chat that are like, you know, 20 years old that weren't even born then. So, but this is a, one of those inflection points that's once in a generation inflection point, I'm sure you agree. What scoped the order of magnitude of the change and the opportunity around the marketplace, the business models, the technology, and ultimately benefits the society. >> Yeah. Wow. Getting bigger. >> You have 10 seconds, go. >> I know. Yeah. (laughing) No, look, so I think it is what we're seeing is really the next phase of what you might call cloud, right? This notion of delivering services, the way they've been packaged together, traditionally by the hyperscalers is now being challenged. and what we're seeing is really opening that up to new levels of innovation, and I think that will be huge for businesses because it'll help meet them where they are. Instead of needing to contort the businesses to, you know, make it work with the technology, the technology will support the business and where it's going. Give people more optionality, more flexibility in order to get there, and I think in the end, for us as individuals, it will just make for better experiences, right? You can get better performance, better interactivity, given that devices are so much of what we do, and so much of what we interact with all the time. This sort of flexibility and optionality will fundamentally better for us as individuals in our experiences. >> And we're seeing that with ChatGPT, everyone's talking about, just early days. There'll be more and more of things like that, that are next gen, like obviously like, wow, that's a fall out of your chair moment. >> It'll be the next wave of innovation that's unleashed. >> All right, Kit Colbert, thanks for coming on and sharing and exploring the Supercloud architecture, Cloud Chaos, the Cloud Smart, there's a transition progression happening and it's happening fast. This is the supercloud wave. If you're not on this wave, you'll be driftwood. That's a Pat Gelsinger quote on theCUBE. This is theCUBE Be right back with more Supercloud coverage, here in Palo Alto after this break. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)

(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about the massive $61 billion planned acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. And I'm here with Phil Brotherton of NetApp to discuss the implications for customers, for the industry, and NetApp's particular point of view. Phil, welcome. Good to see you again. >> It's great to see you, Dave. >> So this topic has garnered a lot of conversation. What's your take on this epic event? What does it mean for the industry generally, and customers specifically? >> You know, I think time will tell a little bit, Dave. We're in the early days. We've, you know, so we heard the original announcements and then it's evolved a little bit, as we're going now. I think overall it'll be good for the ecosystem in the end. There's a lot you can do when you start combining what VMware can do with compute and some of the hardware assets of Broadcom. There's a lot of security things that can be brought, for example, to the infrastructure, that are very high-end and cool, and then integrated, so it's easy to do. So I think there's a lot of upside for it. There's obviously a lot of concern about what it means for vendor consolidation and pricing and things like that. So time will tell. >> You know, when this announcement first came out, I wrote a piece, you know, how "Broadcom will tame the VMware beast," I called it. And, you know, looked at Broadcom's history and said they're going to cut, they're going to raise prices, et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen a different tone, certainly, as Broadcom has got into the details. And I'm sure I and others maybe scared a lot of customers, but I think everybody's kind of calming down now. What are you hearing from customers about this acquisition? How are they thinking about it? >> You know, I think it varies. There's, I'd say generally we have like half our installed base, Dave, runs ESX Server, so the bulk of our customers use VMware, and generally they love VMware. And I'm talking mainly on-prem. We're just extending to the cloud now, really, at scale. And there's a lot of interest in continuing to do that, and that's really strong. The piece that's careful is this vendor, the cost issues that have come up. The things that were in your piece, actually. And what does that mean to me, and how do I balance that out? Those are the questions people are dealing with right now. >> Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of talk about the macro, the macro headwinds. Everybody's being a little cautious. The CIOs are tapping the brakes. We all sort of know that story. But we have some data from our partner ETR that ask, they go out every quarter and they survey, you know, 1500 or so IT practitioners, and they ask the ones that are planning to spend less, that are cutting, "How are you going to approach that? What's your primary methodology in terms of achieving, you know, cost optimization?" The number one, by far, answer was to consolidate redundant vendors. It was like, it's now up to about 40%. The second, distant second, was, "We're going to, you know, optimize cloud costs." You know, still significant, but it was really that consolidating the redundant vendors. Do you see that? How does NetApp fit into that? >> Yeah, that is an interesting, that's a very interesting bit of research, Dave. I think it's very right. One thing I would say is, because I've been in the infrastructure business in Silicon Valley now for 30 years. So these ups and downs are, that's a consistent thing in our industry, and I always think people should think of their infrastructure and cost management. That's always an issue, with infrastructure as cost management. What I've told customers forever is that when you look at cost management, our best customers at cost management are typically service providers. There's another aspect to cost management, is you want to automate as much as possible. And automation goes along with vendor consolidation, because how you automate different products, you don't want to have too many vendors in your layers. And what I mean by the layers of ecosystem, there's a storage layer, the network layer, the compute layer, like, the security layer, database layer, et cetera. When you think like that, everybody should pick their partners very carefully, per layer. And one last thought on this is, it's not like people are dumb, and not trying to do this. It's, when you look at what happens in the real world, acquisitions happen, things change as you go. And in these big customers, that's just normal, that things change. But you always have to have this push towards consolidating and picking your vendors very carefully. >> Also, just to follow up on that, I mean, you know, when you think about multi-cloud, and you mentioned, you know, you've got some big customers, they do a lot of M & A, it's kind of been multi-cloud by accident. "Oh, we got all these other tools and storage platforms and whatever it is." So where does NetApp fit in that whole consolidation equation? I'm thinking about, you know, cross-cloud services, which is a big VMware theme, thinking about a consistent experience, on-prem, hybrid, across the three big clouds, out to the edge. Where do you fit? >> So our view has been, and it was this view, and we extend it to the cloud, is that the data layer, so in our software, is called ONTAP, the data layer is a really important layer that provides a lot of efficiency. It only gets bigger, how you do compliance, how you do backup, DR, blah blah blah. All that data layer services needs to operate on-prem and on the clouds. So when you look at what we've done over the years, we've extended to all the clouds, our data layer. We've put controls, management tools, over the top, so that you can manage the entire data layer, on-prem and cloud, as one layer. And we're continuing to head down that path, 'cause we think that data layer is obviously the path to maximum ability to do compliance, maximum cost advantages, et cetera. So we've really been the company that set our sights on managing the data layer. Now, if you look at VMware, go up into the network layer, the compute layer, VMware is a great partner, and that's why we work with them so closely, is they're so perfect a fit for us, and they've been a great partner for 20 years for us, connecting those infrastructural data layers: compute, network, and storage. >> Well, just to stay on that for a second. I've seen recently, you kind of doubled down on your VMware alliance. You've got stuff at re:Invent I saw, with AWS, you're close to Azure, and I'm really talking about ONTAP, which is sort of an extension of what you were just talking about, Phil, which is, you know, it's kind of NetApp's storage operating system, if you will. It's a world class. But so, maybe talk about that relationship a little bit, and how you see it evolving. >> Well, so what we've been seeing consistently is, customers want to use the advantages of the cloud. So, point one. And when you have to completely refactor apps and all this stuff, it limits, it's friction. It limits what you can do, it raises costs. And what we did with VMware, VMware is this great platform for being able to run basically client-server apps on-prem and cloud, the exact same way. The problem is, when you have large data sets in the VMs, there's some cost issues and things, especially on the cloud. That drove us to work together, and do what we did. We GA-ed, we're the, so NetApp is the only independent storage, independent storage, say this right, independent storage platform certified to run with VMware cloud on Amazon. We GA-ed that last summer. We GA-ed with Azure, the Azure VMware service, a couple months ago. And you'll see news coming with GCP soon. And so the idea was, make it easy for customers to basically run in a hybrid model. And then if you back out and go, "What does that mean for you as a customer?", it's not saying you should go to the cloud, necessarily, or stay on-prem, or whatever. But it's giving you the flexibility to cost-optimize where you want to be. And from a data management point of view, ONTAP gives you the consistent data management, whichever way you decide to go. >> Yeah, so I've been following NetApp for decades, when you were Network Appliance, and I saw you go from kind of the workstation space into the enterprise. I saw you lean into virtualization really early on, and you've been a great VMware partner ever since. And you were early in cloud, so, sort of talking about, you know, that cross-cloud, what we call supercloud. I'm interested in what you're seeing in terms of specific actions that customers are taking. Like, I think about ELAs, and I think it's a two-edged sword. You know, should customers, you know, lean into ELAs right now? You know, what are you seeing there? You talked about, you know, sort of modernizing apps with things like Kubernetes, you know, cloud migration. What are some of the techniques that you're advising customers to take in the context of this acquisition? >> You know, so the basics of this are pretty easy. One is, and I think even Raghu, the CEO of VMware, has talked about this. Extending your ELA is probably a good idea. Like I said, customers love VMware, so having a commitment for a time, consistent cost management for a time is a good strategy. And I think that's why you're hearing ELA extensions being discussed. It's a good idea. The second part, and I think it goes to your surveys, that cost optimization point on the cloud is, moving to the cloud has huge advantages, but if you just kind of lift and shift, oftentimes the costs aren't realized the way you'd want. And the term "modernization," changing your app to use more Kubernetes, more cloud-native services, is often a consideration that goes into that. But that requires time. And you know, most companies have hundreds of apps, or thousands of apps, they have to consider modernizing. So you want to then think through the journey, what apps are going to move, what gets modernized, what gets lifted-shifted, how many data centers are you compressing? There's a lot of data center, the term I've been hearing is "data center evacuations," but data center consolidation. So that there's some even energy savings advantages sometimes with that. But the whole point, I mean, back up to my whole point, the whole point is having the infrastructure that gives you the flexibility to make the journey on your cost advantages and your business requirements. Not being forced to it. Like, it's not really a philosophy, it's more of a business optimization strategy. >> When you think about application modernization and Kubernetes, how does NetApp, you know, fit into that, as a data layer? >> Well, so if you kind of think, you said, like our journey, Dave, was, when we started our life, we were doing basically virtualization of volumes and things for technical customers. And the servers were always bare metal servers that we got involved with back then. This is, like, going back 20 years. Then everyone moved to VMs, and, like, it's probably, today, I mean, getting to your question in a second, but today, loosely, 20% bare metal servers, 80% virtual machines today. And containers is growing, now a big growing piece. So, if you will, sort of another level of virtual machines in containers. And containers were historically stateless, meaning the storage didn't have anything to do. Storage is always the stateful area in the architectures. But as containers are getting used more, stateful containers have become a big deal. So we've put a lot of emphasis into a product line we call Astra that is the world's best data management for containers. And that's both a cloud service and used on-prem in a lot of my customers. It's a big growth area. So that's what, when I say, like, one partner that can do data management, just, that's what we have to do. We have to keep moving with our customers to the type of data they want to store, and how do you store it most efficiently? Hey, one last thought on this is, where I really see this happening, there's a booming business right now in artificial intelligence, and we call it modern data analytics, but people combining big data lakes with AI, and that's where some of this, a lot of the container work comes in. We've extended objects, we have a thing we call file-object duality, to make it easy to bridge the old world of files to the new world of objects. Those all go hand in hand with app modernization. >> Yeah, it's a great thing about this industry. It never sits still. And you're right, it's- >> It's why I'm in it. >> Me too. Yeah, it's so much fun. There's always something. >> It is an abstraction layer. There's always going to be another abstraction layer. Serverless is another example. It's, you know, primarily stateless, that's probably going to, you know, change over time. All right, last question. In thinking about this Broadcom acquisition of VMware, in the macro climate, put a sort of bow on where NetApp fits into this equation. What's the value you bring in this context? >> Oh yeah, well it's like I said earlier, I think it's the data layer of, it's being the data layer that gives you what you guys call the supercloud, that gives you the ability to choose which cloud. Another thing, all customers are running at least two clouds, and you want to be able to pick and choose, and do it your way. So being the data layer, VMware is going to be in our infrastructures for at least as long as I'm in the computer business, Dave. I'm getting a little old. So maybe, you know, but "decades" I think is an easy prediction, and we plan to work with VMware very closely, along with our customers, as they extend from on-prem to hybrid cloud operations. That's where I think this will go. >> Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. Look at the business case for migrating off of VMware. It just doesn't make sense. It works, it's world class, it recover... They've done so much amazing, you know, they used to be called, Moritz called it the software mainframe, right? And that's kind of what it is. I mean, it means it doesn't go down, right? And it supports virtually any application, you know, around the world, so. >> And I think getting back to your original point about your article, from the very beginning, is, I think Broadcom's really getting a sense of what they've bought, and it's going to be, hopefully, I think it'll be really a fun, another fun era in our business. >> Well, and you can drive EBIT a couple of ways. You can cut, okay, fine. And I'm sure there's some redundancies that they'll find. But there's also, you can drive top-line revenue. And you know, we've seen how, you know, EMC and then Dell used that growth from VMware to throw off free cash flow, and it was just, you know, funded so much, you know, innovation. So innovation is the key. Hock Tan has talked about that a lot. I think there's a perception that Broadcom, you know, doesn't invest in R & D. That's not true. I think they just get very focused with that investment. So, Phil, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's fun being here. >> Yeah, our pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Supercloud 2. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host John Furrier. We're here at our tricked out Palo Alto studio. We're going live wall to wall all day. We're inserting a number of pre-recorded interviews, folks like Walmart. We just heard from Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks, and I'm really pleased to welcome in David Flynn. David Flynn, you may know as one of the people behind Fusion-io, completely changed the way in which people think about storing data, accessing data. David Flynn now the founder and CEO of a company called Hammerspace. David, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> David: Good to see you too. >> And Dr. Nelu Mihai is the CEO and founder of Cloud of Clouds. He's actually built a Supercloud. We're going to get into that. Nelu, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Happy New Year. >> Yeah, Happy New Year. So I'm going to start right off with a little debate that's going on in the community if you guys would bring out this slide. So Bob Muglia early today, he gave a definition of Supercloud. He felt like we had to tighten ours up a little bit. He said a Supercloud is a platform, underscoring platform, that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. Now, Nelu, we have this shared doc, and you've been in there. You responded, you said, well, hold on. Supercloud really needs to be an architecture, or else we're going to have this stove pipe of stove pipes, really. And then you went on with more detail, what's the information model? What's the execution model? How are users going to interact with Supercloud? So I start with you, why architecture? The inference is that a platform, the platform provider's responsible for the architecture? Why does that not work in your view? >> No, the, it's a very interesting question. So whenever I think about platform, what's the connotation, you think about monolithic system? Yeah, I mean, I don't know whether it's true or or not, but there is this connotation of of monolithic. On the other hand, if you look at what's a problem right now with HyperClouds, from the customer perspective, they're very complex. There is a heterogeneous world where actually every single one of this HyperClouds has their own architecture. You need rocket scientists to build a cloud applications. Always there is this contradiction between cost and performance. They fight each other. And I'm quoting here a former friend of mine from Bell Labs who work at AWS who used to say "Cloud is cheap as long as you don't use it too much." (group chuckles) So clearly we need something that kind of plays from the principle point of view the role of an operating system, that seats on top of this heterogeneous HyperCloud, and there's nothing wrong by having these proprietary HyperClouds, think about processors, think about operating system and so on, so forth. But in order to build a system that is simple enough, I think we need to go deeper and understand. >> So the argument, the counterargument to that, David, is you'll never get there. You need a proprietary system to get to market sooner, to solve today's problem. Now I don't know where you stand on this platform versus architecture. I haven't asked you, but. >> I think there are aspects of both for sure. I mean it needs to be an architecture in the sense that it's broad based and open and so forth. But you know, platform, you could say as long as people can instantiate it themselves, on their own infrastructure, as long as it's something that can be deployed as, you know, software defined, you don't want the concept of platform being the monolith, you know, combined hardware and software. So it really depends on what you're focused on when you're saying platform, you know, I'd say as long as they software defined thing, to where it can literally run anywhere. I mean, because I really think what we're talking about here is the original concept of cloud computing. The ability to run anything anywhere, without having to care about the physical infrastructure. And what we have today is not that, the cloud today is a big mainframe in the sky, that just happens to be large enough that once you select which region, generally you have enough resources. But, you know, nowadays you don't even necessarily have enough resources in one region. and then you're kind of stuck. So we haven't really gotten to that utility model of computing. And you're also asked to rewrite your application, you know, to abandon the conveniences of high performance file access. You got to rewrite it to use object storage stuff. We have to get away from that. >> Okay, I want to just drill on that, 'cause I think I like that point about, there's not enough availability, but on the developer cloud, the original AWS premise was targeting developers, 'cause at that time, you have to provision a Sun box get a Cisco DSU/CSU, now you get on the cloud. But I think you're giving up the scale question, 'cause I think right now, scale is huge, enterprise grade versus cloud for developers. >> That's Right. >> Because I mean look at, Amazon, Azure, they got compute, they got storage, they got queuing, and some stuff. If you're doing a startup, you throw your app up there, localhost to cloud, no big deal. It's the scale thing that gets me- >> And you can tell by the fact that, in regions that are under high demand, right, like in London or LA, at least with the clients we work with in the median entertainment space, it costs twice as much for the exact same cloud instances that do the exact same amount of work, as somewhere out in rural Canada. So why is it you have such a cost differential, it has to do with that supply and demand, and the fact that the clouds aren't really the ability to run anything anywhere. Even within the same cloud vendor, you're stuck in a specific region. >> And that was never the original promise, right? I mean it was, we turned it into that. But the original promise was get rid of the heavy lifting of IT. >> Not have to run your own, yeah, exactly. >> And then it became, wow, okay I can run anywhere. And then you know, it's like web 2.0. You know people say why Supercloud, you and I talked about this, why do you need a name for Supercloud? It's like web 2.0. >> It's what Cloud was supposed to be. >> It's what cloud was supposed to be, (group laughing and talking) exactly, right. >> Cloud was supposed to be run anything anywhere, or at least that's what we took it as. But you're right, originally it was just, oh don't have to run your own infrastructure, and you can choose somebody else's infrastructure. >> And you did that >> But you're still bound to that. >> Dave: And People said I want more, right? >> But how do we go from here? >> That's, that's actually, that's a very good point, because indeed when the first HyperClouds were designed, were designed really focus on customers. I think Supercloud is an opportunity to design in the right way. Also having in mind the computer science rigor. And we should take advantage of that, because in fact actually, if cloud would've been designed properly from the beginning, probably wouldn't have needed Supercloud. >> David: You wouldn't have to have been asked to rewrite your application. >> That's correct. (group laughs) >> To use REST interfaces to your storage. >> Revisist history is always a good one. But look, cloud is great. I mean your point is cloud is a good thing. Don't hold it back. >> It is a very good thing. >> Let it continue. >> Let it go as as it is. >> Yeah, let that thing continue to grow. Don't impose restrictions on the cloud. Just refactor what you need to for scale or enterprise grade or availability. >> And you would agree with that, is that true or is it problem you're solving? >> Well yeah, I mean it, what the cloud is doing is absolutely necessary. What the public cloud vendors are doing is absolutely necessary. But what's been missing is how to provide a consistent interface, especially to persistent data. And have it be available across different regions, and across different clouds. 'cause data is a highly localized thing in current architecture. It only exists as rendered by the storage system that you put it in. Whether that's a legacy thing like a NetApp or an Isilon or even a cloud data service. It's localized to a specific region of the cloud in which you put that. We have to delocalize data, and provide a consistent interface to it across all sites. That's high performance, local access, but to global data. >> And so Walmart earlier today described their, what we call Supercloud, they call it the Walmart cloud native platform. And they use this triplet model. They have AWS and Azure, no, oh sorry, no AWS. They have Azure and GCP and then on-prem, where all the VMs live. When you, you know, probe, it turns out that it's only stateless in the cloud. (John laughs) So, the state stuff- >> Well let's just admit it, there is no such thing as stateless, because even the application binaries and libraries are state. >> Well I'm happy that I'm hearing that. >> Yeah, okay. >> Because actually I have a lot of debate (indistinct). If you think about no software running on a (indistinct) machine is stateless. >> David: Exactly. >> This is something that was- >> David: And that's data that needs to be distributed and provided consistently >> (indistinct) >> Across all the clouds, >> And actually, it's a nonsense, but- >> Dave: So it's an illusion, okay. (group talks over each other) >> (indistinct) you guys talk about stateless. >> Well, see, people make the confusion between state and persistent state, okay. Persistent state it's a different thing. State is a different thing. So, but anyway, I want to go back to your point, because there's a lot of debate here. People are talking about data, some people are talking about logic, some people are talking about networking. In my opinion is this triplet, which is data logic and connectivity, that has equal importance. And actually depending on the application, can have the center of gravity moving towards data, moving towards what I call execution units or workloads. And connectivity is actually the most important part of it. >> David: (indistinct). >> Some people are saying move the logic towards the data, some other people, and you are saying actually, that no, you have to build a distributed data mesh. What I'm saying is actually, you have to consider all these three variables, all these vector in order to decide, based on application, what's the most important. Because sometimes- >> John: So the application chooses >> That's correct. >> Well it it's what operating systems were in the past, was principally the thing that runs and manages the jobs, the job scheduler, and the thing that provides your persistent data (indistinct). >> Okay. So we finally got operating system into the equation, thank you. (group laughs) >> Nelu: I actually have a PhD in operating system. >> Cause what we're talking about is an operating system. So forget platform or architecture, it's an operating environment. Let's use it as a general term. >> All right. I think that's about it for me. >> All right, let's take (indistinct). Nelu, I want ask you quick, 'cause I want to give a, 'cause I believe it's an operating system. I think it's going to be a reset, refactored. You wrote to me, "The model of Supercloud has to be open theoretical, has to satisfy the rigors of computer science, and customer requirements." So unique to today, if the OS is going to be refactored, it's not going to be, may or may not be Red Hat or somebody else. This new OS, obviously requirements are for customers too but is what's the computer science that is needed? Where are we, what's the missing? Where's the science in this shift? It's not your standard OS it's not like an- (group talks over each other) >> I would beg to differ. >> (indistinct) truly an operation environment. But the, if you think about, and make analogies, what you need when you design a distributed system, well you need an information model, yeah. You need to figure out how the data is located and distributed. You need a model for the execution units, and you need a way to describe the interactions between all these objects. And it is my opinion that we need to go deeper and formalize these operations in order to make a step forward. And when we design Supercloud, and design something that is better than the current HyperClouds. And actually that is when we design something better, you make a system more efficient and it's going to be better from the cost point of view, from the performance point of view. But we need to add some math into all this customer focus centering and I really admire AWS and their executive team focusing on the customer. But now it's time to go back and see, if we apply some computer science, if you try to formalize to build a theoretical model of cloud, can we build a system that is better than existing ones? >> So David, how do you- >> this is what I'm saying. >> That's a good question >> How do You see the operating system of a, or operating environment of a decentralized cloud? >> Well I think it's layered. I mean we have operating systems that can run systems quite efficiently. Linux has sort of one in the data center, but we're talking about a layer on top of that. And I think we're seeing the emergence of that. For example, on the job scheduling side of things, Kubernetes makes a really good example. You know, you break the workload into the most granular units of compute, the containerized microservice, and then you use a declarative model to state what is needed and give the system the degrees of freedom that it can choose how to instantiate it. Because the thing about these distributed systems, is that the complexity explodes, right? Running a piece of hardware, running a single server is not a problem, even with all the many cores and everything like that. It's when you start adding in the networking, and making it so that you have many of them. And then when it's going across whole different data centers, you know, so, at that level the way you solve this is not manually (group laughs) and not procedurally. You have to change the language so it's intent based, it's a declarative model, and what you're stating is what is intended, and you're leaving it to more advanced techniques, like machine learning to decide how to instantiate that service across the cluster, which is what Kubernetes does, or how to instantiate the data across the diverse storage infrastructure. And that's what we do. >> So that's a very good point because actually what has been neglected with HyperClouds is really optimization and automation. But in order to be able to do both of these things, you need, I'm going back and I'm stubborn, you need to have a mathematical model, a theoretical model because what does automation mean? It means that we have to put machines to do the work instead of us, and machines work with what? Formula, with algorithms, they don't work with services. So I think Supercloud is an opportunity to underscore the importance of optimization and automation- >> Totally agree. >> In HyperCloud, and actually by doing that, we can also have an interesting connotation. We are also contributing to save our planet, because if you think right now. we're consuming a lot of energy on this HyperClouds and also all this AI applications, and I think we can do better and build the same kind of application using less energy. >> So yeah, great point, love that call out, the- you know, Dave and I always joke about the old, 'cause we're old, we talk about, you know, (Nelu Laughs) old history, OS/2 versus DOS, okay, OS's, OS/2 is silly better, first threaded OS, DOS never went away. So how does legacy play into this conversation? Because I buy the theoretical, I love the conversation. Okay, I think it's an OS, totally see it that way myself. What's the blocker? Is there a legacy that drags it back? Is the anchor dragging from legacy? Is there a DOS OS/2 moment? Is there an opportunity to flip the script? This is- >> I think that's a perfect example of why we need to support the existing interfaces, Operating Systems, real operating systems like Linux, understands how to present data, it's called a file system, block devices, things that that plumb in there. And by, you know, going to a REST interface and S3 and telling people they have to rewrite their applications, you can't even consume your application binaries that way, the OS doesn't know how to pull that sort of thing. So we, to get to cloud, to get to the ability to host massive numbers of tenants within a centralized infrastructure, you know, we abandoned these lower level interfaces to the OS and we have to go back to that. It's the reason why DOS ultimately won, is it had the momentum of the install base. We're seeing the same thing here. Whatever it is, it has to be a real file system and not a come down file system >> Nelu, what's your reaction, 'cause you're in the theoretical bandwagon. Let's get your reaction. >> No, I think it's a good, I'll give, you made a good analogy between OS/2 and DOS, but I'll go even farther saying, if you think about the evolution operating system didn't stop the evolution of underlying microprocessors, hardware, and so on and so forth. On the contrary, it was a catalyst for that. So because everybody could develop their own hardware, without worrying that the applications on top of operating system are going to modify. The same thing is going to happen with Supercloud. You're going to have the AWSs, you're going to have the Azure and the the GCP continue to evolve in their own way proprietary. But if we create on top of it the right interface >> The open, this is why open is important. >> That's correct, because actually you're going to see sometime ago, everybody was saying, remember venture capitals were saying, "AWS killed the world, nobody's going to come." Now you see what Oracle is doing, and then you're going to see other players. >> It's funny, Amazon's trying to be more like Microsoft. Microsoft's trying to be more like Amazon and Google- Oracle's just trying to say they have cloud. >> That's, that's correct, (group laughs) so, my point is, you're going to see a multiplication of this HyperClouds and cloud technology. So, the system has to be open in order to accommodate what it is and what is going to come. Okay, so it's open. >> So the the legacy- so legacy is an opportunity, not a blocker in your mind. And you see- >> That's correct, I think we should allow them to continue to to to be their own actually. But maybe you're going to find a way to connect with it. >> Amazon's the processor, and they're on the 80 80 80 right? >> That's correct. >> You're saying you love people trying to get put to work. >> That's a good analogy. >> But, performance levels you say good luck, right? >> Well yeah, we have to be able to take traditional applications, high performance applications, those that consume file system and persistent data. Those things have to be able to run anywhere. You need to be able to put, put them onto, you know, more elastic infrastructure. So, we have to actually get cloud to where it lives up to its billing. >> And that's what you're solving for, with Hammerspace, >> That's what we're solving for, making it possible- >> Give me the bumper sticker. >> Solving for how do you have massive quantities of unstructured file data? At the end of the day, all data ultimately is unstructured data. Have that persistent data available, across any data center, within any cloud, within any region on-prem, at the edge. And have not just the same APIs, but have the exact same data sets, and not sucked over a straw remote, but at extreme high performance, local access. So how do you have local access to globally shared distributed data? And that's what we're doing. We are orchestrating data globally across all different forms of storage infrastructure, so you have a consistent access at the highest performance levels, at the lowest level innate built into the OS, how to consume it as (indistinct) >> So are you going into the- all the clouds and natively building in there, or are you off cloud? >> So This is software that can run on cloud instances and provide high performance file within the cloud. It can take file data that's on-prem. Again, it's software, it can run in virtual or on physical servers. And it abstracts the data from the existing storage infrastructure, and makes the data visible and consumable and orchestratable across any of it. >> And what's the elevator pitch for Cloud of Cloud, give that too. >> Well, Cloud of Clouds creates a theoretical model of cloud, and it describes every single object in the cloud. Where is data, execution units, and connectivity, with one single class of very simple object. And I can, I can give you (indistinct) >> And the problem that solves is what? >> The problem that solves is, it creates this mathematical model that is necessary in order to do other interesting things, such as optimization, using sata engines, using automation, applying ML for instance. Or deep learning to automate all this clouds, if you think about in the industrial field, we know how to manage and automate huge plants. Why wouldn't it do the same thing in cloud? It's the same thing you- >> That's what you mean by theoretical model. >> Nelu: That's correct. >> Lay out the architecture, almost the bones of skeleton or something, or, and then- >> That's correct, and then on top of it you can actually build a platform, You can create your services, >> when you say math, you mean you put numbers to it, you kind of index it. >> You quantify this thing and you apply mathematical- It's really about, I can disclose this thing. It's really about describing the cloud as a knowledge graph for every single object in the graph for node, an edge is a vector. And then once you have this model, then you can apply the field theory, and linear algebra to do operation with these vectors. And it's, this creates a very interesting opportunity to let the math do this thing for us. >> Okay, so what happens with hyperscale, or it's like AWS in your model. >> So in, in my model actually, >> Are they happy with this, or they >> I'm very happy with that. >> Will they be happy with you? >> We create an interface to every single HyperCloud. We actually, we don't need to interface with the thousands of APIs, but you know, if we have the 80 20 rule, and we map these APIs into this graph, and then every single operation that is done in this graph is done from the beginning, in an optimized manner and also automation ready. >> That's going to be great. David, I want us to go back to you before we close real quick. You've had a lot of experience, multiple ventures on the front end. You talked to a lot of customers who've been innovating. Where are the classic (indistinct)? Cause you, you used to sell and invent product around the old school enterprises with storage, you know that that trajectory storage is still critical to store the data. Where's the classic enterprise grade mindset right now? Those customers that were buying, that are buying storage, they're in the cloud, they're lifting and shifting. They not yet put the throttle on DevOps. When they look at this Supercloud thing, Are they like a deer in the headlights, or are they like getting it? What's the, what's the classic enterprise look like? >> You're seeing people at different stages of adoption. Some folks are trying to get to the cloud, some folks are trying to repatriate from the cloud, because they've realized it's better to own than to rent when you use a lot of it. And so people are at very different stages of the journey. But the one thing that's constant is that there's always change. And the change here has to do with being able to change the location where you're doing your computing. So being able to support traditional workloads in the cloud, being able to run things at the edge, and being able to rationalize where the data ought to exist, and with a declarative model, intent-based, business objective-based, be able to swipe a mouse and have the data get redistributed and positioned across different vendors, across different clouds, that, we're seeing that as really top of mind right now, because everybody's at some point on this journey, trying to go somewhere, and it involves taking their data with them. (John laughs) >> Guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on, for John, Dave. Stay tuned, we got a great analyst power panel coming right up. More from Palo Alto, Supercloud 2. Be right back. (bouncy music)

>> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. This is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jack Greenfield. He's the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and the Chief Architect for the global technology platform at Walmart. Jack, I want to thank you for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me and appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Now we call what you've built a SuperCloud. That's our term, not yours, but how would you describe the Walmart Cloud Native Platform? >> So WCNP, as the acronym goes, is essentially an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. And what that means is that we've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source, and we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. So Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. It does a lot. In particular the orchestration of containers, but it delegates through API a lot of key functions. So for example, secret management, traffic management, there's a need for telemetry and observability at a scale beyond what you get from raw Kubernetes. That is to say, harvesting the metrics that are coming out of Kubernetes and processing them, storing them in time series databases, dashboarding them, and so on. There's also an angle to Kubernetes that gets a lot of attention in the daily DevOps routine, that's not really part of the open source deliverable itself, and that is the DevOps sort of CICD pipeline-oriented lifecycle. And that is something else that we've added and integrated nicely. And then one more piece of this picture is that within a Kubernetes cluster, there's a function that is critical to allowing services to discover each other and integrate with each other securely and with proper configuration provided by the concept of a service mesh. So Istio, Linkerd, these are examples of service mesh technologies. And we have gone ahead and integrated actually those two. There's more than those two, but we've integrated those two with Kubernetes. So the net effect is that when a developer within Walmart is going to build an application, they don't have to think about all those other capabilities where they come from or how they're provided. Those are already present, and the way the CICD pipelines are set up, it's already sort of in the picture, and there are configuration points that they can take advantage of in the primary YAML and a couple of other pieces of config that we supply where they can tune it. But at the end of the day, it offloads an awful lot of work for them, having to stand up and operate those services, fail them over properly, and make them robust. All of that's provided for. >> Yeah, you know, developers often complain they spend too much time wrangling and doing things that aren't productive. So I wonder if you could talk about the high level business goals of the initiative in terms of the hardcore benefits. Was the real impetus to tap into best of breed cloud services? Were you trying to cut costs? Maybe gain negotiating leverage with the cloud guys? Resiliency, you know, I know was a major theme. Maybe you could give us a sense of kind of the anatomy of the decision making process that went in. >> Sure, and in the course of answering your question, I think I'm going to introduce the concept of our triplet architecture which we haven't yet touched on in the interview here. First off, just to sort of wrap up the motivation for WCNP itself which is kind of orthogonal to the triplet architecture. It can exist with or without it. Currently does exist with it, which is key, and I'll get to that in a moment. The key drivers, business drivers for WCNP were developer productivity by offloading the kinds of concerns that we've just discussed. Number two, improving resiliency, that is to say reducing opportunity for human error. One of the challenges you tend to run into in a large enterprise is what we call snowflakes, lots of gratuitously different workloads, projects, configurations to the extent that by developing and using WCNP and continuing to evolve it as we have, we end up with cookie cutter like consistency across our workloads which is super valuable when it comes to building tools or building services to automate operations that would otherwise be manual. When everything is pretty much done the same way, that becomes much simpler. Another key motivation for WCNP was the ability to abstract from the underlying cloud provider. And this is going to lead to a discussion of our triplet architecture. At the end of the day, when one works directly with an underlying cloud provider, one ends up taking a lot of dependencies on that particular cloud provider. Those dependencies can be valuable. For example, there are best of breed services like say Cloud Spanner offered by Google or say Cosmos DB offered by Microsoft that one wants to use and one is willing to take the dependency on the cloud provider to get that functionality because it's unique and valuable. On the other hand, one doesn't want to take dependencies on a cloud provider that don't add a lot of value. And with Kubernetes, we have the opportunity, and this is a large part of how Kubernetes was designed and why it is the way it is, we have the opportunity to sort of abstract from the underlying cloud provider for stateless workloads on compute. And so what this lets us do is build container-based applications that can run without change on different cloud provider infrastructure. So the same applications can run on WCNP over Azure, WCNP over GCP, or WCNP over the Walmart private cloud. And we have a private cloud. Our private cloud is OpenStack based and it gives us some significant cost advantages as well as control advantages. So to your point, in terms of business motivation, there's a key cost driver here, which is that we can use our own private cloud when it's advantageous and then use the public cloud provider capabilities when we need to. A key place with this comes into play is with elasticity. So while the private cloud is much more cost effective for us to run and use, it isn't as elastic as what the cloud providers offer, right? We don't have essentially unlimited scale. We have large scale, but the public cloud providers are elastic in the extreme which is a very powerful capability. So what we're able to do is burst, and we use this term bursting workloads into the public cloud from the private cloud to take advantage of the elasticity they offer and then fall back into the private cloud when the traffic load diminishes to the point where we don't need that elastic capability, elastic capacity at low cost. And this is a very important paradigm that I think is going to be very commonplace ultimately as the industry evolves. Private cloud is easier to operate and less expensive, and yet the public cloud provider capabilities are difficult to match. >> And the triplet, the tri is your on-prem private cloud and the two public clouds that you mentioned, is that right? >> That is correct. And we actually have an architecture in which we operate all three of those cloud platforms in close proximity with one another in three different major regions in the US. So we have east, west, and central. And in each of those regions, we have all three cloud providers. And the way it's configured, those data centers are within 10 milliseconds of each other, meaning that it's of negligible cost to interact between them. And this allows us to be fairly agnostic to where a particular workload is running. >> Does a human make that decision, Jack or is there some intelligence in the system that determines that? >> That's a really great question, Dave. And it's a great question because we're at the cusp of that transition. So currently humans make that decision. Humans choose to deploy workloads into a particular region and a particular provider within that region. That said, we're actively developing patterns and practices that will allow us to automate the placement of the workloads for a variety of criteria. For example, if in a particular region, a particular provider is heavily overloaded and is unable to provide the level of service that's expected through our SLAs, we could choose to fail workloads over from that cloud provider to a different one within the same region. But that's manual today. We do that, but people do it. Okay, we'd like to get to where that happens automatically. In the same way, we'd like to be able to automate the failovers, both for high availability and sort of the heavier disaster recovery model between, within a region between providers and even within a provider between the availability zones that are there, but also between regions for the sort of heavier disaster recovery or maintenance driven realignment of workload placement. Today, that's all manual. So we have people moving workloads from region A to region B or data center A to data center B. It's clean because of the abstraction. The workloads don't have to know or care, but there are latency considerations that come into play, and the humans have to be cognizant of those. And automating that can help ensure that we get the best performance and the best reliability. >> But you're developing the dataset to actually, I would imagine, be able to make those decisions in an automated fashion over time anyway. Is that a fair assumption? >> It is, and that's what we're actively developing right now. So if you were to look at us today, we have these nice abstractions and APIs in place, but people run that machine, if you will, moving toward a world where that machine is fully automated. >> What exactly are you abstracting? Is it sort of the deployment model or, you know, are you able to abstract, I'm just making this up like Azure functions and GCP functions so that you can sort of run them, you know, with a consistent experience. What exactly are you abstracting and how difficult was it to achieve that objective technically? >> that's a good question. What we're abstracting is the Kubernetes node construct. That is to say a cluster of Kubernetes nodes which are typically VMs, although they can run bare metal in certain contexts, is something that typically to stand up requires knowledge of the underlying cloud provider. So for example, with GCP, you would use GKE to set up a Kubernetes cluster, and in Azure, you'd use AKS. We are actually abstracting that aspect of things so that the developers standing up applications don't have to know what the underlying cluster management provider is. They don't have to know if it's GCP, AKS or our own Walmart private cloud. Now, in terms of functions like Azure functions that you've mentioned there, we haven't done that yet. That's another piece that we have sort of on our radar screen that, we'd like to get to is serverless approach, and the Knative work from Google and the Azure functions, those are things that we see good opportunity to use for a whole variety of use cases. But right now we're not doing much with that. We're strictly container based right now, and we do have some VMs that are running in sort of more of a traditional model. So our stateful workloads are primarily VM based, but for serverless, that's an opportunity for us to take some of these stateless workloads and turn them into cloud functions. >> Well, and that's another cost lever that you can pull down the road that's going to drop right to the bottom line. Do you see a day or maybe you're doing it today, but I'd be surprised, but where you build applications that actually span multiple clouds or is there, in your view, always going to be a direct one-to-one mapping between where an application runs and the specific cloud platform? >> That's a really great question. Well, yes and no. So today, application development teams choose a cloud provider to deploy to and a location to deploy to, and they have to get involved in moving an application like we talked about today. That said, the bursting capability that I mentioned previously is something that is a step in the direction of automatic migration. That is to say we're migrating workload to different locations automatically. Currently, the prototypes we've been developing and that we think are going to eventually make their way into production are leveraging Istio to assess the load incoming on a particular cluster and start shedding that load into a different location. Right now, the configuration of that is still manual, but there's another opportunity for automation there. And I think a key piece of this is that down the road, well, that's a, sort of a small step in the direction of an application being multi provider. We expect to see really an abstraction of the fact that there is a triplet even. So the workloads are moving around according to whatever the control plane decides is necessary based on a whole variety of inputs. And at that point, you will have true multi-cloud applications, applications that are distributed across the different providers and in a way that application developers don't have to think about. >> So Walmart's been a leader, Jack, in using data for competitive advantages for decades. It's kind of been a poster child for that. You've got a mountain of IP in the form of data, tools, applications best practices that until the cloud came out was all On Prem. But I'm really interested in this idea of building a Walmart ecosystem, which obviously you have. Do you see a day or maybe you're even doing it today where you take what we call the Walmart SuperCloud, WCNP in your words, and point or turn that toward an external world or your ecosystem, you know, supporting those partners or customers that could drive new revenue streams, you know directly from the platform? >> Great question, Steve. So there's really two things to say here. The first is that with respect to data, our data workloads are primarily VM basis. I've mentioned before some VMware, some straight open stack. But the key here is that WCNP and Kubernetes are very powerful for stateless workloads, but for stateful workloads tend to be still climbing a bit of a growth curve in the industry. So our data workloads are not primarily based on WCNP. They're VM based. Now that said, there is opportunity to make some progress there, and we are looking at ways to move things into containers that are currently running in VMs which are stateful. The other question you asked is related to how we expose data to third parties and also functionality. Right now we do have in-house, for our own use, a very robust data architecture, and we have followed the sort of domain-oriented data architecture guidance from Martin Fowler. And we have data lakes in which we collect data from all the transactional systems and which we can then use and do use to build models which are then used in our applications. But right now we're not exposing the data directly to customers as a product. That's an interesting direction that's been talked about and may happen at some point, but right now that's internal. What we are exposing to customers is applications. So we're offering our global integrated fulfillment capabilities, our order picking and curbside pickup capabilities, and our cloud powered checkout capabilities to third parties. And this means we're standing up our own internal applications as externally facing SaaS applications which can serve our partners' customers. >> Yeah, of course, Martin Fowler really first introduced to the world Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh concept and this whole idea of data products and domain oriented thinking. Zhamak Dehghani, by the way, is a speaker at our event as well. Last question I had is edge, and how you think about the edge? You know, the stores are an edge. Are you putting resources there that sort of mirror this this triplet model? Or is it better to consolidate things in the cloud? I know there are trade-offs in terms of latency. How are you thinking about that? >> All really good questions. It's a challenging area as you can imagine because edges are subject to disconnection, right? Or reduced connection. So we do place the same architecture at the edge. So WCNP runs at the edge, and an application that's designed to run at WCNP can run at the edge. That said, there are a number of very specific considerations that come up when running at the edge, such as the possibility of disconnection or degraded connectivity. And so one of the challenges we have faced and have grappled with and done a good job of I think is dealing with the fact that applications go offline and come back online and have to reconnect and resynchronize, the sort of online offline capability is something that can be quite challenging. And we have a couple of application architectures that sort of form the two core sets of patterns that we use. One is an offline/online synchronization architecture where we discover that we've come back online, and we understand the differences between the online dataset and the offline dataset and how they have to be reconciled. The other is a message-based architecture. And here in our health and wellness domain, we've developed applications that are queue based. So they're essentially business processes that consist of multiple steps where each step has its own queue. And what that allows us to do is devote whatever bandwidth we do have to those pieces of the process that are most latency sensitive and allow the queue lengths to increase in parts of the process that are not latency sensitive, knowing that they will eventually catch up when the bandwidth is restored. And to put that in a little bit of context, we have fiber lengths to all of our locations, and we have I'll just use a round number, 10-ish thousand locations. It's larger than that, but that's the ballpark, and we have fiber to all of them, but when the fiber is disconnected, and it does get disconnected on a regular basis. In fact, I forget the exact number, but some several dozen locations get disconnected daily just by virtue of the fact that there's construction going on and things are happening in the real world. When the disconnection happens, we're able to fall back to 5G and to Starlink. Starlink is preferred. It's a higher bandwidth. 5G if that fails. But in each of those cases, the bandwidth drops significantly. And so the applications have to be intelligent about throttling back the traffic that isn't essential, so that it can push the essential traffic in those lower bandwidth scenarios. >> So much technology to support this amazing business which started in the early 1960s. Jack, unfortunately, we're out of time. I would love to have you back or some members of your team and drill into how you're using open source, but really thank you so much for explaining the approach that you've taken and participating in SuperCloud2. >> You're very welcome, Dave, and we're happy to come back and talk about other aspects of what we do. For example, we could talk more about the data lakes and the data mesh that we have in place. We could talk more about the directions we might go with serverless. So please look us up again. Happy to chat. >> I'm going to take you up on that, Jack. All right. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the Cube community. Keep it right there for more action from SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE presents Ignite '22 brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas guys and girls. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day one of the cube's two day coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite at the MGM Grand. Dave, we've been having some great conversations today, we have a great two day lineup execs from Palo Alto, it's partner network, customers, et cetera. Going to be talking about infrastructure as code. We talk about that a lot, how Palo is partnering with its partner ecosystem to really help customers deliver security across the organization. >> We do a predictions post every year. Hopefully you can hear me. So we do this predictions post every year. I've done it for a number of years, and I want to say it was either 2018 or 2019, we predicted that HashiCorp was one of these companies to watch. And then last August, on August 9th, we had supercloud event in Palo Alto. We had David McJannet in, who is the CEO of HashiCorp. And we really see Hashi as a key player in terms of affecting multicloud consistency. Sometimes we call it supercloud, you building on top of the hyperscale cloud. So super excited to have HashiCorp on. >> Really an important conversation. We've got an alumni back with us. Asvin Ramesh is here the senior director of Alliances at HashiCorp. Welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. Good to be back. >> Great to have you. Talk to us a little bit about what's going on at HashiCorp, your relationship with Palo Alto Networks, and what's in it for customers. >> Yeah, no, no, great question. So, Palo Alto has been a fantastic partner of ours for many years now. We started way back in 2018, 2019 focusing on the basics, putting integrations in place that customers can be using together. And so it's been a great journey. Both are very synergistic. Palo Alto is focused on multicloud, so are we, we focus on cloud infrastructure automation, and ensuring that customers are able to bring in agility, reliability, security, and be able to deliver to their business. And then Palo Alto brings in great security components to that multicloud story. So it's a great story altogether. >> Some of the challenges that organizations have been facing. Palo Alto just released a survey, I think this morning if I can find it here what's next in cyber organizations facing massive headwinds ransomware becoming a household word, business email compromise being a challenge. But also in the last couple of years the massive shift to multi-club or organizations are living an operating need to do so securely. It's no longer nice to have anymore. It's absolutely table stakes for survival, and being able to thrive and grow for any business. >> Yeah, no, I think it's almost a sort of rethinking of how you would build your infrastructure up. So the more times you do it right the better you are built to scale. That's been one of the bedrocks of how we've been working with Palo Alto, which is rethinking how should IT be building their infrastructure in a multicloud world. And I think the market timing is right for both of us in terms of the progress that we've been able to make. >> So, I mean Terraform has really become sort of a key ingredient to the cloud operating model, especially across clouds. Kind of describe how partners, and customers are are implementing that cross-cloud capability. What's that journey look like? What's the level of maturity today? >> Yeah, great question, Dave. So we sort of see customers in three buckets. The first bucket is when customers are in the initial phases of their cloud journey. So they have disparate teams in their business units try out clouds themselves. Typically there is some event that occurs either some sort of a security scare or a a cloud cost event that triggers a rethinking of how they should be thinking about this in a scalable way. So that leads to where the cloud operating model which is a framework that HashiCorp has. And we use that successfully with customers to talk them through how they should be thinking about their process, about how they should be standardizing how people operate, and then the products they should be including, but then you come to that stage, and you start to think about a centralized platform team that is putting in golden workflows, that is putting in as a service mindset for their business units thinking through policies at a corporate level. And then that is a second stage. And then, but this is also in some customers more around public clouds. But then the third stage that we see is when they start embracing their private cloud or the on-prem data center, and have the same principles address across both public clouds, and the on-prem data center, and then Terraform scale for any infrastructure. So, once you start to put these practices in place not just from a technology standpoint, but from a process, and product standpoint, you're easily able to scale with that central platform organization. >> So, it's all about that consistency across your estate irrespective of whether it's on-prem in AWS, Azure, Google, the Edge, maybe. I mean, that's starting, right? >> Asvin: Yes. >> And so when you talk about the... Break it down a little bit process and product, where do you and Palo Alto sort of partner and add value? What's that experience like? >> Yeah, so, I think as I mentioned earlier the bedrock is having ways in which customers are able to use our products together, right? And then being able to evangelize the usage of that product. So one example I'll give you is with Prisma Cloud, and Terraform Cloud to your point about Terraform earlier. So customers can be using Prisma Cloud with Terraform Cloud in a way that you can get security context telemetry during an infrastructure run, and then use policies that you have in Prisma Cloud to be able to get or run or to implement or run or make sure essentially it is adhering to your security policy or any other audits that you want to create or any other cost that you want to be able to control. >> Where are your customer conversations these days? We know that security is a board level conversation. Interestingly, in that same survey that Palo Alto released this morning that I mentioned they found that there's a big lack of alignment between the board and the C-suite staff, the executive suite in terms of security. Where are your conversations, and how are you maybe facilitating that alignment that needs to be there? Because security it's not a nice to have. >> Yeah, I think in our experience, the alignment is there. I think especially with the macro environment it's more about where where do you allocate those resources. I think those are conversations that we're just starting to see happen, but I think it's the natural progression of how the environment is moving, and maybe another quarter or two, I think we'll see greater alignment there. >> So, and I saw some data that said I guess it was a study you guys did 90% of customer say multicloud is working for them. That surprised me 'cause you hear all this negativity around multicloud, I've been kind of negative about multicloud to be honest. Like that's a symptom of MNA, and a or multi-vendor. But how do you interpret that? When they say multicloud is working? How so? >> Yeah, I think the maturity of customers are varied as I mentioned through the stages, right? So, there are customers who even in the initial phases of their journey where they have different business units using different clouds, and from a C standpoint that might still look like multicloud, right? Though the way we think about it is you should be really in stage two, and stage three to real leverage the real power of multicloud. But I think it's that initial hump that you need to go through, and being able to get oriented towards it, have the right set of skillsets, the thought process, the product, the process in place. And once you have that then you'll start reaping the benefits over a period of time, especially when some other environments events happen, and you're able to easily adjust to that because you're leveraging this multicloud environment, and you have a clear policy of where you'll use which cloud. >> So I interpreted that data as, okay, multicloud is working from the standpoint of we are multicloud, okay? So, and our business is working, but when I talk to customers, they want more to your point, they want that consistent experience. And so it's been by, to use somebody else's term, by default. Chuck Whitten I think came up with that term versus by design. And now I think they have an objective of, okay, let's make multicloud work even better. Maybe I can say that. And so what does that experience look like? That means a common experience all the way through my stack, my infrastructure stack, which is that's going to be interesting to see how that goes down 'cause you got three separate clouds, and are doing their own APIs. But certainly from a security standpoint, the PaaS layer, even as I go up the stack, how do you see that outcome, and say the next two to five years? >> Yeah, so, we go back to our customers, and they're very successful ones who've used the cloud operating model. And for us the cloud operating model for us includes four layers. So on the infrastructure layer, we have Terraform and Packer, on the security layer we have Vault and Boundary, on the networking layer we have Consul, and then on applications we have Nomad and Waypoint. But then you really look at, from a people process, and product standpoint, for people it's how do you standardize the workflows that they're able to use, right? So if you have a central platform team in place that is looking at common use cases that multiple business units are using. and then creates a golden workflow, for example, right? For these various business units to be able to use or creates what we call a system of record for cloud adoption it helps multiple business units then latch onto this work that this central platform team is doing. And they need to have a product mindset, right? So not like a project that you just start and end with. You have this continuous improvement mindset within that platform team. And they build these processes, they build these golden workflows, they build these policies in place, and then they offer that as a service to the business units to be able to use. So that increases the adoption of multicloud. And also more importantly, you can then allow that multicloud usage to be governed in the way that aligns with your overall corporate objectives. And obviously in self-interest, you'd use Terraform or Vault because you can then use it across multiple clouds. >> Well, let's say I buy into that. Okay, great. So I want that common experience 'cause so when you talk about infrastructure, take us through an example. So when I hear infrastructure, I say, okay if I'm using an S3 bucket over here an Azure blob over there, they got different APIs, they got different primitives. I want you to abstract that away. Is that what you do? >> Yeah, so I think we've seen different use cases being used across different clouds too. So I don't think it's sort of as simple as, hey, should I use this or that? It is ensuring that the common tool that you use to be able to leverage safer provisioning, right? Is Terraform. So the central team is then trained in not only just usage of Terraform open source, but their Terraform cloud, which is our managed service, and Terraform enterprise which is the self-managed, but on-prem product, it's them being qualified to be able to build these consistent workflows using whatever tool that they have or whatever skew that they have from Terraform. And then applying business logic on top of that to your point about, hey, we'd like to use AWS for these kind of workloads. We'd like to use GCP, for example, on data or use Microsoft Azure for some other type of- >> Collaboration >> Right? But the common tooling, right? Remains around the usage of Terraform, and they've trained their teams there's a standard workflow, there's standard process around it. >> Asvin, I was looking at that survey the HashiCorp state of cloud strategy survey, and it talked about skill shortages as being the number one barrier to multicloud. We talk about the cyber skills gap all the time. It's huge. It's obviously a huge issue. I saw some numbers just the other day that there's 26 million developers but there's less than 3 million cybersecurity professionals. How does HashiCorp and Palo Alto Networks, how do you help customers address that skills gap so that they that they can leverage multicloud as a driver of the business? >> Yeah, another great question. So I think I'd say in two or three different ways. One is be able to provide greater documentation for our customers to be able to self use the product so that with the existing people, for example, you build out a known example, right? You're trying to achieve this goal here is how you use our products together. And so they'll be able to self-service, right? So that's one. Second is obviously both of us have great services partners, so we are always working with these services partners to get their teams trained and scaled up around these skill gaps. And I think I'd say the third which is where we see a lot of adoption is around usage of the managed services that we have. If you take Palo Alto's example in this Palo Alto will speak better to it, but they have SOC services, right? That you can consume. So, they're performing that service for you. Similarly, on our side we have a HashiCorp Cloud Platform, HCP, where you can consume Vault as a service, you can consume Consul as a service. Terraform cloud is a managed service, so you don't need as many people to be able to run that service. And we abstract all the complexity associated with that by ourselves, right? So I'd say these are the three ways that we address it. >> So Zero Trust across big buzzword. We heard this in this morning keynotes, AWS is always saying, well, we'll talk about it too, but, okay, customers are starting to talk about Zero Trust. You talk to CISOs, they're like, yes, we're adopting this mentality of unless you're trusted, we don't trust you. So, okay, cool. So you think about the cloud you've got the shared responsibility model, and then you've got the application developers are being asked to do more, secure the code. You got the CISO now has to deal with not only the shared responsibility model, but shared responsibility models across clouds, and got to bring his or her security ethos to the app dev team, and then you got to audit kind of making sure they're like the last line of defense. So my question is when you think about code security and Zero Trust in that new environment the problem with a lot of the clouds is they don't make the CISOs life any easier. So I got to believe that your objective with Palo Alto is to actually make the organization's lives easier. So, how do you deal with all that complexity in specifically in a Zero Trust multicloud environment? >> Yeah, so I'll give you a specific example. So, on code to cloud security which is one of Palo Alto's sort of key focus area is that Prisma Cloud and Terraform Cloud example that I gave, right? Where you'd be able to use what we call run tasks essentially, web hook integrations to be able to get a run or provide some telemetry back to Prisma Cloud for customers to be able to make a decision. On the Zero Trust side, we partner both on the Prisma Cloud side, and the Cortex XSOAR side around our products of Vault and and Consul. So what Vault does is it allows you to control secrets, it allows you to store secrets. So a Prisma Cloud or a Cortex customer can be using secrets from Vault familiarly for that particular transaction or workflow itself, right? Rather than, and so it's based on identity, and not on the basis of just the secret sort of lying around. Same thing with console helps you with discovery, and management of services. So, Cortex and you can automate, a lot of this work can get automated using the product that I talked about from Zero Trust. I think the key thing for Zero Trust in our view is it is a end destination, right? So it'll take certain time, depends on the enterprise, depends on where things are. It's a question of specifically focusing on value that Palo Alto and HashiCorp's products bring to solve specific use cases within that Zero Trust bucket, and solve one problem at a time rather than try to say that, hey, only Palo Alto, and only HashiCorp or whatever will solve everything in Zero Trust, right? Because that is not going to be- >> And to your point, it's never going to end, right? I mean you're talk about Cortex bringing a lot of automation. You guys bring a lot of automation now Palo Alto just bought Cider Security. Now we're getting into supply chain. I mean it going to hit it at the edge and IoT, the people don't want another IoT stove pipe. >> Lisa: No. >> Right? They want that to be part of the whole picture. So, you're never done. >> Yeah, no, but it is this continuous journey, right? And again, different companies are different parts of that journey, and then you go and rinse and repeat, you maybe acquire another company, and then they have a different maturity, so you get them on board on this. And so we see this as a multi-generational shift as Dave like to call it. And we're happy to be in the middle of it with Palo Alto Networks. >> It's definitely a multi-generational shift. Asvin, it's been great having you back on theCUBE. Thank you for giving us the update on what Hashi and Palo Alto are doing, the value in it for customers, the cloud operating model. And we should mention that HashiCorp yesterday just won a Technology Partner of the Year award. Congratulations. Yes. >> We're very, very thrilled with the recognition from Palo Alto Networks for the Technology Partner of the Year. >> Congrats. >> Thank you Keep up the great partnership. Thank you so much. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> For our guest, and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, live in Las Vegas. You watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Now welcome back to theCUBE, everyone. I'm John Walls, and once again, we're glad to have you here for AWS re:Invent 22. Our coverage continues here on Thursday, day three, of what has been a jam-packed week of tech and AWS, of course, has been the great host for this. It's now a pleasure to welcome in Anurag Gupta, who is the founder and CEO of Shoreline, joining us here as part of the AWS Global Showcase Startup Program, and Anurag, good to see you, sir. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much. >> Tell us about Shoreline, about what you're up to. >> So we're a DevOps company. We're really focused on repairing issues. If you think about it, there are a ton DevOps companies and we all went to the cloud in order to gain faster innovation and by and large check. Then all of the things involved in getting things into production, artifact generation, testing, configuration management, deployment, also by and large, automated. Now pity the poor SRE who's getting the deluge of stuff on them, every week, every two days, sometimes multiple times a day, and it's complicated, right? Kubernetes, VMs, lots of services, multiple clouds, sometimes, and you know, they need to know a little bit about everything. And you know what, there are a ton of companies that actually help you with what we call Day-2 Ops. It's just that most of them help you with observability, telling you what's gone wrong, or incident management, routing something to someone. But you know, back when I was at AWS, I never got really that excited about one more dashboard to look at or one more like better ticket routing. What used to really excite me was having some issue extinguished forever. And if you think about it, like the first five minutes of an incident are detecting and routing. The next hour, two hours, is some human being going in and fixing it, so that feels like the big opportunity to reduce, so hopefully we can talk a little bit about different ways that one can do that. >> What about Day-2 Ops? Just tell me about how you define that. >> So I basically define it as once the software goes into a production, just making sure things stay up and are healthy and you're resilient and you don't get errors and all of those sorts of things because everything breaks sooner or later, you know, to a greater or lesser degree. >> Especially that SRE you're talking about, right? >> Yeah. >> So let's go back to that scenario. Yeah, you pity the poor soul because they do have to be a little expert in everything. >> Exactly. >> And that's really challenging and we all know that, that's really hard. So how do you go about trying to lighten that burden, then? >> So when you look at the numbers, about somewhere between 40% to even 95% of the alarms that fire, the alerts that fire, are false positives and that's crazy. Why is someone waking up just to deal with? >> It's a lot of wasted time, isn't it? >> A lot of wasted time. And you know, you're also training someone into what I call ClickOps, just to go in and click the button and resolve it and you don't actually know if it was the false positive or it's the rare real positive, and so that's a challenge, right? And so the first thing to do is to figure out where the false positives are. Like, let's say Datadog tells you that CPU is high and alarms. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's hard for them to tell, right? But you have to then introspect it into something precise like, oh, CPU is high, but response times are standard and the request rate is high. Okay, that's a good thing. I'm going to ignore this. Or CPU is high, but it kind of resolves itself, so I'm going to not wake anybody up. Or CPU is high and oh, it's the darn JVM starting to garbage collect again, so let me go and take a heap dump and give that to my dev team and then bounce the JVM and you know, without waking anybody up, or CPU is high, I have no idea what's going on. Now it's time to wake somebody up. You know, what you want to use humans for is the ability to think about novel stuff, not to do repetitive stuff, so that's the first step. The second step is, about 40% of what remains is repetitive and straightforward. So like a disk is full, I'd better clean up the garbage on the disk or maybe grow the disk. People shouldn't wake up to deal to grow a disk. And so for that, what you want to do is just have those sorts of things get automated away. One of the nice things about Shoreline is, is that we take the experience in what we build for one company, and if they're willing, provide it to everybody else. Our belief is, a central tenant is, if someone somewhere fixes something, everyone everywhere should gain the benefit because we all sit on the same three clouds, we all sit on the same set of database infrastructure, et cetera. We should all get the same benefits. Why do we have to scar our own backs rather than benefiting from somebody else's scar tissue, so that's the second thing. The third thing is, okay, let's say it's not straightforward, not something I've seen before, then in that case, what often happens is on average like eight people get involved. You know, it initially goes to L1 support or L1 ops and, but they don't necessarily know because, as you say, the environment's complex. And so, you know, they go into Slack and they say, "At here, can somebody help me with this?" And those things take a much longer time, so wouldn't it be better that if your best SRE is able to say, "Hey, check these 20 things and then run these actions." We could convert that into like a Jupyter Notebook where you could say the incident got fired I pre-populated all the diagnostics, and then I tell people very precisely, "If you see this, run this, et cetera." Like a wiki, but actually something you could run right in this product. And then, you know, last piece of the puzzle, the smaller piece, is sometimes new things happen and when something new happens, what you want is sort of the central tech of Shoreline, which is parallel distributed, real-time debugging. And so the ability to do, you know, execute a command across your fleet rather than individual boxes so that you can say something like, "I'm hearing that my credit card app is slow. For everything tagged as being part of my credit card app, please run for everything that's running over 90% CPU, please run a top command." And so, you know, then you can run in the same time on one host as you can on 30,000 and that helps a lot. So that's the core of what we do. People use us for all sorts of things, also preventative maintenance, you know, just the proactive regular things. You know, like your car, you do an oil change, well, you know, you need to rotate your certs, certificates. You need to make sure that, you know, there isn't drift in your configurations, there isn't drift in your software. There's also security elements to it, right? You want to make sure that you aren't getting weird inbound/outbound traffic across to ports you don't expect to be open. You don't want to have these processes running, you know, maybe something's bad. And so that's all the kind of weird anomaly detection that's easy to do if you run things in a distributed parallel way across everything. That's super hard to do if you have to go and Whac-A-Mole across one box after the next. >> Well, which leads to a question just in terms of setting priorities then, which is what you're talking about helping companies establish priorities, this hierarchy of level one warning, level two, level three, level four. Sounds like that should be a basic, right? But you're saying that's not, that's not really happening in the enterprise. >> Well, you know, I would say that if you hadn't automated deployments, you should do that first. If you haven't automated your testing pipeline, shame on you, you should do that like a year ago. But now it's time to help people in production because you've done that other work and people are suffering. You know, the crazy thing about the cloud is, is that companies spend about three times more on the human beings to operate their cloud infrastructure as on the cloud infrastructure itself. I've yet to hear anybody say that their cloud bill is too low, you know, so, you know, there's a clearer savings also available. And you know, back when I was at AWS, obviously I had to keep the lights on too, but you know, I had to do that, but it's kind of a tax on my engineers and I'd really spend, prefer to spend the head count on innovation, on doing things that delight my customers. You never delight your customers by keeping the lights on, you just avoid irritating them by turning 'em off, right? >> So why are companies so fixed in on spending so much time on manually repairing things and not looking for these kinds of little, much more elegant solution and cost-efficient, time-saving, so on so forth. >> Yeah, I think there just hasn't been very much in this space as yet because it's a hard, hard problem to solve. You know, automation's a little bit scary and that's the reality of it and the way you make it less scary is by proving it out, by doing the simple things first, like reducing the alert fatigue, you know, that's easy. You know, providing notebooks to people so that they can click things and do things in a straightforward way. That's pretty easy. The full automation, that's kind of the North Star, that's what we aspire to do. But you know, people get there over time and one of our customers had 700 instances of this particular incident solved for them last week. You imagine how many human beings would've been doing it otherwise, you know? >> Right. >> That's just one thing, you know? >> How many did it take the build a pyramid? How many decades did that take, right? You had an announcement this week. I don't think we've talked about that. >> No, yeah, so we just announced Incident Insights, which is a free product that lets people plug into initially PagerDuty and pretty soon the Opsgenie ServiceNow, et cetera. And what you can do is, is you give us an API key read-only and we will suck your PagerDuty data out. We apply some lightweight ML unsupervised learning, and in a couple of minutes, we categorize all of your incidents so that you can understand which are the ones that happen most often and are getting resolved really quickly. That's ClickOps, right? Those alarms shouldn't fire. Which are the ones that involve a lot of people? Those are good candidates to build a notebook. Which are the ones that happen again and again and again? Those are good candidates for automation. And so, I think one of the challenges people have is, is that they don't actually know what their teams are doing and so this is intended to provide them that visibility. One of our very first customers was doing the beta test for us on it. He used to tell us he had about 100 tickets, incidents a week. You know, he brought this tool in and he had 2,100 last week and was all, you know, like these false alarms, so while he's giving us- >> That was eye opening for him to see that, sure. >> And why he's, you know, looking at it, you know, he's just like filing Jiras to say, "Oh, change this threshold, cancel this alarm forever." You know, all of that kind of stuff. Before you get to do the fancy work, you got to clean your room before you get to do anything else, right? >> Right, right, dinner before dessert, basically. >> There you go. >> Hey, thanks for the insights on this and again the name of the new product, by the way, is... >> Incident Insights. >> Incident Insights. >> Totally free. >> Free. >> Yeah, it takes a couple of minutes to set up. Go to the website, Shoreline.io/insight and you can be up and running in a couple of minutes. >> Outstanding, again, the company is Shoreline. This is Anurag Gupta, and thank you for being with us. We appreciate it. >> Appreciate it, thank you. >> Glad to have to here on theCUBE. Back with more from AWA re:Invent 22. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage. (gentle music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, wonderful Cloud community and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by the brilliant John Furrier. John, how you doing this afternoon? >> Doing great, feeling good. We've got day three here, another day tomorrow. Wall-to-wall coverage we're already over a hundred something videos, live getting up. >> You're holding up well. >> And then Cloud show is just popping. It's back to pre-pandemic levels. The audience is here, what recession? But there is one coming but apparently doesn't seem to be an unnoticed with the Cloud community. >> I think, we'll be talking a little bit about that in our next interview in the state of the union. Not just our union, but the the general global economy and the climate there with some fabulous guests from Software One. Please welcome Neil and Bernd, welcome to the show, guys. How you doing? >> Great, thank you. >> Really good. >> Yeah, like you said, just getting over the jet lag. >> Yeah, yeah. Pretty good today, yeah, (laughing loudly) glad we did it today. >> I love that Neil, set your smiling and I can feel your energy. Tell us a little bit about Software One and what you all do. >> Yeah, so Software One we're a software and Cloud solutions provider. We're in 90 countries. We have 65,000 customers. >> Savannah: Just a few. >> Yeah, and we really focus on being close to the customers and helping customers through their software and Cloud journey. So we transact, we sell software in Cloud, 10,000 different ISVs. And then on top of that we a lot of services around the spend optimization FinOps we'll talk about as well, and lots of other areas. But yeah, we're really a large scale partner in this space. >> That's awesome. FinOps, cost optimization, pretty much all we've been talking about here on the give. It's very much a hot topic. I'm actually excited about this and Bernd I'm going to throw this one to you first. We haven't actually done a proper definition of what FinOps is at the show yet. What is FinOps? >> Well, largely speaking it's Cloud cost optimization but for us it's a lot more than for others. That's our superpower. We do it all. We do the technology side but we also do the licensing side. So, we have a differentiated offering. If you would look at the six Rs of application migration we do it all, not even an Accenture as it all. And that is our differentiation. >> You know, yesterday Adams left was on the Keynote. He's like waving his hands around. It's like, "Hey, we got if you want to tighten your belt, come to the Cloud." I'm like, wait a minute. In 2008 when the last recession, Amazon wasn't a factor. They were small. Now they're massive, they're huge. They're a big part of the economic equation. What does belt tightening mean? Like what does that mean? Like do customers just go to the marketplace? Do they go, do you guys, so a lot of moving parts now on how they're buying software and they're fine tuning their Cloud too. It's not just eliminate budget, it's fine tune the machine if you will... >> 'make a smarter Cloud. >> Explain this phenomenon, how people are tackling this cost optimization, Cloud optimization. 'Cause they're not going to stop building. >> No. >> This is right sizing and tuning and cutting. >> Yeah, we see, of course with so many customers in so many countries, we have a lot of different views on maturity and we see customers taking the FinOps journey at different paces. But fundamentally what we see is that it's more of an afterthought and coming in at a panic stage rather than building it and engaging with it from the beginning and doing it continuously. And really that's the huge opportunity and AWS is a big believer in this of continued optimization of the Cloud is a confident Cloud. A confident Cloud means you'll do more with it. If you lose confidence in that bill in what how much it's costing you, you're going to retract. And so it's really about making sure all customers know exactly what's in there, how it's optimized, restocking, reformatting applications, getting more out of the microservices and getting more value out the Cloud and that will help them tighten that belt. >> So the euphoric enthusiasm of previous years of building water just fallen the pipes leaving the lights on when you go to bed. I mean that's kind of the mentality. People were not literally I won't say they weren't not paying attention but there was some just keep going we're all good now it's like whoa, whoa. We turn that service off and no one's using it or do automation. So there's a lot more of that mindset emerging. We're hearing that for the first time price performance being mindful of what's on and off common sense basically. >> Yeah, but it's not just that the lights are on and the faucets are open it's also the air condition is running. So the FinOps foundation is estimating that about a third of Cloud spend is waste and that's where FinOps comes in. We can help customers be more efficient in the Cloud and lower their Cloud spend while doing the same or more. >> So, let's dig in a little bit there. How do you apply FinOps when migrating to the Cloud? >> Well, you start with the business case and you're not just looking at infrastructure costs like most people do you ought look at software licensing costs. For example, if you run SQL on-premise you have an enterprise agreement. But if you move it to the Cloud you may actually take a different more favorable licensing agreement and save a lot of money. And these things are hidden. They're not to be seen but they need to be part of the business case. >> When you look at the modernization trend we had an analyst on our session with David Vellante and Zs (indistinct) from ZK Consulting. He had an interesting comment. He said, "Spend more in Cloud to save more." Which is a mindset that doesn't come across right. Wait a minute, spend more, save more. You can do bet right now with the Clouds kind of the the thesis of FinOps, you don't have to cut. Just kind of cut the waste out but still spend and build if you're smart, there's a lot more of that going on. What does that mean? >> I mean, yeah I've got a good example of this is, we're the largest Microsoft provider in the world. And when of course when you move Microsoft workloads to the Cloud, you don't... Maybe you don't want a server, you can go serverless, right? So you may not win a server. Bernd said SQL, right? So, it's not just about putting applications in the Cloud and workloads in the Cloud. It's about modernizing them and then really taking advantage of what you can really do in the Cloud. And I think that's where the customers are still pretty immature. They're still on that journey of throwing stuff in there and then realizing actually they can take way more advantage of what services are in there to reduce the amount and get even more in there. >> Yeah, and so the... You want to say, something? >> How much, just building on the stereotypical image of Cloud customer is the marketing person with a credit card, right? And there are many of them and they all buy their own Cloud and companies have a hard time consolidating the spend pulling it together, even within a country. But across countries across the globe, it's really, really hard. If you pull it all together, you get a better discount. You spend more to save more. >> Yeah, and also there's a human piece. We had an intern two summers ago playing with our Cloud. We're on a Cloud with our media plus stack left a service was playing around doing some tinkering and like, where's this bill? What is this extra $20,000 came from. It just, we left a service on... >> It's a really good point actually. It's something that we see almost every day right now which is customers also not understanding what they've put in the Cloud and what the implications of spikes are. And also therefore having really robust monitoring and processes and having a partner that can look after that for them. Otherwise we've got customers where they've been really shocked about not doing things the right way because they've empowered the business but also not with the maturity that the business needs to have that responsibility. >> And that's a great point. New people coming in and or people being platooned through new jobs are getting used to the Cloud. That's a great point. I got that brings up my security question 'cause this comes up a lot. So that's what's a lot of spend of people dialing up more security. Obviously people try everything with security, every tool, every platform, and throw everything at the problem. How does that impact the FinOps equation? 'Cause Dev SecOps is now part of everything. Okay, moving security at the CICD pipeline, that's cool. Check Cloud native applications, microservices event-based services check. But now you've got more security. How does that factor into the cost side? What you guys look at that can you share your thoughts on how your customers are managing their security posture without getting kind of over the barrel, if you will? >> Since we are at AWS re:Invent, right? We can talk about the well architected framework of AWS and there's six components to it. And there's reliability, there's security cost, performance quality, operational quality and sustainability. And so when we think about migrating apps to the Cloud or modernizing them in the Cloud security is always a table stakes. >> And it has to be, yeah, go ahead. >> I really like what AWS is doing with us on that. We partner very closely on that area. And to give you a parallel example of Microsoft I don't feel very good about that at the moment. We see a lot of customers right now that get hacked and normally it's... >> 'yeah that's such a topic. >> You mean on Azure? >> Yeah, and what happens is that they normally it's a crypto mining script that the customer comes in they come in as the customer get hacked and then they... We saw an incident the other day where we had 2,100 security incidents in a minute where it all like exploded on the customer side. And so that's also really important is that the customer's understanding that security element also who they're letting in and out of their organization and also the responsibility they have if things go bad. And that's also not aware, like when they get hacked, are they responsible for that? Are they not responsible? Is the provider... >> 'shared responsibility? >> Yeah. >> 'well that security data lake the open cybersecurity schema framework. That's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out to your point. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Yeah, it is fascinating and it does require a lot of collaboration. What other trends, what other big challenges are you seeing? You're obviously working with customers at incredible scale. What are some of the other problems you're helping them tackle? >> I think we work with customers from SMB all the way up to enterprise and public sector. But what we see is more in the enterprise space. So we see a lot of customers willing to commit a lot to the Cloud based on all the themes that we've set but not commit financially for all the PNLs that they run in all the business units of all the different companies that they may own in different countries. So it's like, how can I commit but not be responsible on the hook for the bill that comes in. And we see this all the time right now and we are working closely with AWS on this. And we see the ability for customers to commit centrally but decentralized billing, decentralized optimization and decentralized FinOps. So that's that educational layer within the business units who owns the PNL where they get that fitness and they own what they're spending but the company is alone can commit to AWS. And I think that's a big trend that we are seeing is centralized commitment but decentralized ownership in that model. >> And that's where the marketplaces kind of fit in as well. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, yeah. Do you want to add some more on that? >> I mean the marketplace, if you're going to cut your bill you go to the marketplace right there you want single dashboard or your marketplace what's the customer going to do when they're going to tighten their belts? What do they do? What's their workflow, marketplace? What's the process? >> Well, on marketplaces, the larger companies will have a private marketplace with dedicated pricing managed service they can call off. But that's for the software of the shelf. They still have the data centers they still have all the legacy and they need to do the which ones are we going to keep which ones are we going to retire, we repurchase, we license, rehouse, relocate, all of those things. >> That's your wheelhouse. >> It's a three, yes is our wheelhouse. It's a three to five year process for most companies. >> This could be a tailwind for you guys. This is like a good time. >> I mean FinOps is super cool and super hot right now. >> Not that you're biased? (all laughing loudly) >> But look, it's great to see it because well we are the magic quadrant leader in software asset management, which is a pedigree of ours. But we always had to convince customers to do that because they're always worried, oh what you're going to find do I have an audit? Do I have to give Oracles some more money or SAP some more money? So there's always like, you know... >> 'don't, (indistinct). >> How compliant do I really want? >> Is anyone paying attention to this? >> Well FinOps it's all upside. Like it's all upside. And so it's completely flipped. And now we speak to most customers that are building FinOps internally and then they're like, hold on a minute I'm a bank. Why do I have hundred people doing FinOps? And so that's the trend that we've seen because they just get more and more value out of it all the time. >> Well also the key mindset is that the consumption based model of Cloud you mentioned Oracle 'cause they're stuck in that whoa, whoa, whoa, how many servers license and they're stuck in that extortion. And now they got Cloud once you're on a variable, what's the downside? >> Exactly and then you can look at all the applications, see where you can go serverless see where you can go native services all that sort of stuff is all upside. >> And for the major workloads like SAP and Oracle and Microsoft defined that customers save in the millions. >> Well just on that point, those VMware, SAP, these workloads they're being rolled and encapsulated into containers and Kubernetes run times moved into the Cloud, they're being refactored. So that's a whole nother ballgame. >> Yes. Lift and shift usually doesn't save you any money. So that's relocation with containers may save you money but in some cases you have to... >> 'it's more in the Cloud now than ever before. >> Yeah >> Yeah, yeah. >> Before we take him to the challenge portion we have a little quiz for you, or not a quiz, but a little prop for you in a second. I want to talk about your role. You have a very important role at the FinOps Foundation and why don't you tell me more about that? You, why don't you go. >> All right, so yeah I mean we are a founding member of the Finops organization. You can tell I'm super passionate about it as well. >> I wanted to keep that club like a poster boy for FinOps right now. It's great, I love the energy. >> You have some VA down that is going to go up on the table and dance, (all laughing loudly) >> We're ready for it. We're waiting for that performance here on theCUBE this week. I promise I would keep everyone up an alert... >> 'and it's on the post. And our value to the foundation is first of all the feedback we get from all our customers, right? We can bring that back as an organization to that also as one of the founding members. We're one of the only ones that really deliver services and platforms. So we'll work with Cloud health, Cloud ability our own platform as well, and we'll do that. And we have over 200 practitioners completely dedicated to FinOps as well. So, it's a great foundation, they're doing an amazing job and we're super proud to be part of that. >> Yeah, I love that you're contributing to the community as well as supporting it, looking after your customers. All right, so our new tradition here on theCUBE at re:Invent 'cause we're looking for your 32nd Instagram reel hot take sizzle of thought leadership on the number one takeaway most important theme of the show this year Bernd do you want to go first? >> Of the re:Invent show or whatever? >> You can interpret that however you want. We've gotten some unique interpretations throughout the week, so we're probing. >> Everybody's looking for the superpower to do more with less in the Cloud. That will be the theme of 2023. >> Perfect, I love that. 10 seconds, your mic very efficient. You're clearly providing an efficient solution based on that answer. >> I won't that much. That's... (laughing loudly) >> It's the quiz. And what about you Neil? Give us your, (indistinct) >> I'm going to steal your comment. It's exactly what I was thinking earlier. Tech is super resilient and tech is there for customers when they want to invest and modernize and do fun stuff and they're also there for when they want to save money. So we are always like a constant and you see that here. It's like this is... It's always happening here, always happening. >> It is always happening. It really can feel the energy. I hope that the show is just as energetic and fun for you guys. As the last few minutes here on theCUBE has been thank you both for joining us. >> Thanks. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about FinOps, Cloud confidence and all things AWS re:Invent. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier, my name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> You got it, it's theCUBE. We are in Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage day one of the full event coverage of AWS reInvent '22 from the Venetian Expo Center. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We love being in Vegas, Dave. >> Well, you know, this is where Super Cloud sort of was born. >> It is. >> Last year, just about a year ago. Steve Mullaney, CEO of of Aviatrix, you know, kind of helped us think it through. And we got some fun stories around. It's happening, but... >> It is happening. We're going to be talking about Super Cloud guys. >> I guess I just did the intro, Steve Mullaney >> You did my intro, don't do it again. >> Sorry I stole that from you, yeah. >> Steve Mullaney, joined just once again, one of our alumni. Steve, great to have you back on the program. >> Thanks for having me back. >> Dave: It's happening. >> It is happening. >> Dave: We talked about a year ago. Net Studio was right there. >> That was two years. Was that year ago, that was a year ago. >> Dave: It was last year. >> Yeah, I leaned over >> What's happening? >> so it's happening. It's happening. You know what, the thing I noticed what's happening now is the maturity of the cloud, right? So, if you think about this whole journey to cloud that has been, what, AWS 12 years. But really over the last few years is when enterprises have really kind of joined that journey. And three or four years ago, and this is why I came out of retirement and went to Aviatrix, was they all said, okay, now we're going to do cloud. You fast forward now three, four years from now, all of a sudden those five-year plans of evacuating the data center, they got one year left, two year left, and they're going, oh crap, we don't have five years anymore. We're, now the maturity's starting to say, we're starting to put more apps into the cloud. We're starting to put business critical apps like SAP into the cloud. This is not just like the low-hanging fruit anymore. So what's happening now is the business criticality, the scale, the maturity. And they're all now starting to hit a lot of limits that have been put into the CSPs that you never used to hit when you didn't have business critical and you didn't have that scale. They were always there. The rocks were always there. Just it was, you never hit 'em. People are starting to hit 'em now. So what's happening now is people are realizing, and I'm going to jump the gun, you asked me for my bumper sticker. The bumper sticker for Aviatrix is, "Good enough is no longer good enough." Now it's funny, it came in a keynote today, but what we see from our customers is it's time to upgrade the native constructs of networking and network security to be enterprise-grade now. It's no longer good enough to just use the native constructs because of a lack of visibility, the lack of controls, the lack of troubleshooting capabilities, all these things. "I now need enterprise grade networking." >> Let me ask you a question 'cause you got a good historical perspective on the industry. When you think about when Maritz was running VMWare. He was like any app, he said basically we're building a software mainframe. And they kind of did that, right? But then they, you know, hit the issue with scale, right? And they can't replicate the cloud. Are there things that we can draw from that experience and apply that to the cloud? What's the same, what's different? >> Oh yeah. So, 1992, do you remember what happened in 1992? I do this, weird German software company called SAP >> Yeah, R3. announced a release as R/3. Which was their first three-tier client-server application of SAP. Before that it ran on mainframes, TCP/IP. Remember that Protocol War? Guess what happened post-1992, everybody goes up like this. Infrastructure completely changes. Cisco, EMC, you name it, builds out these PCE client-server architectures. The WAN changes, MPLS, the campus, everything's home running back to that data center running SAP. That was the last 30 years ago. Great transformation of SAP. They've did it again. It's called S/4Hana. And now it's running and people are switching to S/4Hana and they're moving to the cloud. It's just starting. And that is going to alter how you build infrastructure. And so when you have that, being able to troubleshoot in hours versus minutes is a big deal. This is business critical, millions of dollars. This is not fun and games. So again, back to my, what was good enough for the last three or four years for enterprises no longer good enough, now I'm running business critical apps like SAP, and it's going to completely change infrastructure. That's happening in the cloud right now. And that's obviously a significant seismic shift, but what are some of the barriers that customers have been able to eliminate in order to get there? Or is it just good enough isn't good enough anymore? >> Barriers in terms of, well, I mean >> Lisa: The adoption. Yeah well, I mean, I think it's all the things that they go to cloud is, you know, the complexity, really, it's the agility, right? So the barrier that they have to get over is how do I keep the developer happy because the developer went to the cloud in the first place, why? Swipe the credit card because IT wasn't doing their job, 'cause every time I asked them for something, they said no. So I went around 'em. We need that. That's what they have to overcome in the move to the cloud. That is the obstacle is how do I deliver that visibility, that control, the enterprise, great functionality, but yet give the developer what they want. Because the minute I stop giving them that swipe the card operational model, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to go around me again and I can't, and the enterprise can't have that. >> That's a cultural shift. >> That's the main barrier they've got to overcome. >> Let me ask you another question. Is what we think of as mission critical, the definition changing? I mean, you mentioned SAP, obviously that's mission critical for operations, but you're also seeing new applications being developed in the cloud. >> I would say anything that's, I call business critical, same thing, but it's, business critical is internal to me, like SAP, but also anything customer-facing. That's business critical to me. If that app goes down or it has a problem, I'm not collecting revenue. So, you know, back 30 years ago, we didn't have a lot of customer-facing apps, right? It really was just SAP. I mean there wasn't a heck of a lot of cust- There were customer-facing things. But you didn't have all the digitalization that we have now, like the digital economy, where that's where the real explosion has come, is you think about all the customer-facing applications. And now every enterprise is what? A technology, digital company with a customer-facing and you're trying to get closer and closer to who? The consumer. >> Yeah, self-service. >> Self-service, B2C, everybody wants to do that. Get out of the middle man. And those are business critical applications for people. >> So what's needed under the covers to make all this happen? Give us a little double click on where you guys fit. >> You need consistent architecture. Obviously not just for one cloud, but for any cloud. But even within one cloud, forget multicloud, it gets worst with multicloud. You need a consistent architecture, right? That is automated, that is as code. I can't have the human involved. These are all, this is the API generation, you've got to be able to use automation, Terraform. And all the way from the application development platform you know, through Jenkins and all other software, through CICD pipeline and Terraform, when you, when that developer says, I want infrastructure, it has to go build that infrastructure in real time. And then when it says, I don't need it anymore it's got to take it away. And you cannot have a human involved in that process. That's what's completely changed. And that's what's giving the agility. And that's kind of a cloud model, right? Use software. >> Well, okay, so isn't that what serverless does, right? >> That's part of it. Absolutely. >> But I might still want control sometimes over the runtime if I'm running those mission critical applications. Everything in enterprise is a heterogeneous thing. It's like people, people say, well there's going to, the people going to repatriate back to on-prem, they are not repatriating back to on-prem. >> We were just talking about that, I'm like- >> Steve: It's not going to happen, right? >> It's a myth, it's a myth. >> And there's things that maybe shouldn't have ever gone into the cloud, I get that. Look, do people still have mainframes? Of course. There's certain things that you just, doesn't make sense to move to the new generation. There were things, certain applications that are very static, they weren't dynamic. You know what, keeping it on-prem it's, probably makes sense. So some of those things maybe will go back, but they never should have gone. But we are not repatriating ever, you know, that's not going to happen. >> No I agree. I mean, you know, there was an interesting paper by Andreessen, >> Yeah. >> But, I mean- >> Steve: Yeah it was a little self-serving for some company that need more funding, yeah. You look at the numbers. >> Steve: Yeah. >> It tells the story. It's just not happening. >> No. And the reason is, it's that agility, right? And so that's what people, I would say that what you need to do is, and in order to get that agility, you have to have that consistency. You have to have automation, you have to get these people out of the way. You have to use software, right? So it's that you have that swipe the card operational model for the developers. They don't want to hear the word no. >> Lisa: Right. >> What do you think is going to happen with AWS? Because we heard, I don't know if you heard Selipsky's keynote this morning, but you've probably heard the hallway talk. >> Steve: I did, yeah. >> Okay. You did. So, you know, connecting the dots, you know doubling down on all the primitives, that we expected. We kind of expected more of the higher level stuff, which really didn't see much of that, a little bit. >> Steve: Yeah. So, you know, there's a whole thing about, okay, does the cloud get commoditized? Does it not? I think the secret weapon's the ecosystem, right? Because they're able to sell through with guys like you. Make great margins on that. >> Steve: Yeah, well, yeah. >> What are your thoughts though on the future of AWS? >> IAS is going to get commoditized. So this is the fallacy that a lot of the CSPs have, is they thought that they were going to commoditize enterprise. It never happens that way. What's going to happen is infrastructure as a service, the lower level, which is why you see all the CSPs talking about what? Oracle Cloud, industry cloud. >> Well, sure, absolutely, yeah. >> We got to get to the apps, we got to get to SAP, we got to get to all that, because that's not going to get commoditized, right. But all the infrastructural service where AWS is king that is going to get commoditized, absolutely. >> Okay, so, but historically, you know Cisco's still got 60% plus gross margins. EMC always had good margin. How pure is the lone survivor in Flash? They got 70% gross margins. So infrastructure actually has always been a pretty good business. >> Yeah that's true. But it's a hell of a lot easier, particularly with people like Aviatrix and others that are building these common architectural things that create simplicity and abstract the way the complexities of underneath such that we allow your network to run an AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, whatever, exactly the same. So it makes it a hell of a lot easier >> Dave: Super cloud. >> to go move. >> But I want to tap your brain because you have a good perspective of this because servers used to be a great margin business too on-prem and now it's not. It's a low margin business 'cause all the margin went to Intel. >> Yeah. But the cloud guys, you know, AWS in particular, makes a ton of dough on servers, so, or compute. So it's going to be interesting to see over time if that gets com- that's why they're going so hard after silicon. >> I think if they can, I think if you can capture the workload. So AWS and everyone else, as another example, this SAP, they call that a gravity workload. You know what gravity workload is? It's a black hole. It drags everything else with it. If you get SAP or Oracle or a mainframe app, it ain't going anywhere. And then what's going to happen is all your other apps are going to follow it. So that's what they're all going to fight for, is type of app. >> You said something earlier about, forget multicloud, for a moment, but, that idea of the super cloud, this abstraction layer, I mean, is that a real business value for customers other than, oh I got all these clouds, I need 'em to work together. You know, from your perspective from Aviatrix perspective, is it an opportunity for you to build on top of that? Or are you just looking at, look, I'm going to do really good work in AWS, in Azure? Now we're making the same experience. >> I hear this every single day from our customers is they look and they say, good enough isn't good enough. I've now hit the point, I'm hitting route limitations. I'm hitting, I'm doing things manually, and that's fine when I don't have that many applications or I don't have mission critical. The dogs are eating the dog food, we're going into the cloud and they're looking and then saying this is not an operational model for me. I've hit the point where I can't keep doing this, I can't throw bodies at this, I need software. And that's the opportunity for us, is they look and they say, I'm doing it in one cloud, but, and there's zero chance I'm going to be able to figure that out in the two or three other clouds. Every enterprise I talk to says multicloud is inevitable. Whether they're in it now, they all know they're going to go, because it's the business units that demand it. It's not the IT teams that demand it, it's the line of business that says, I like GCP for this reason. >> The driver's functionality that they're getting. >> It's the app teams that say, I have this service and GCP's better at it than AWS. >> Yeah, so it's not so much a cost game or the end all coffee mug, right? >> No, no. >> Google does this better than Microsoft, or better than- >> If you asked an IT person, they would rather not have multicloud. They actually tried to fight it. No, why would you want to support four clouds when you could support one right? That's insane. >> Dave and Lisa: Right. If they didn't have a choice and, and so it, the decision was made without them, and actually they weren't even notified until day before. They said, oh, good news, we're going to GCP tomorrow. Well, why wasn't I notified? Well, we're notifying you now. >> Yeah, you would've said, no. >> Steve: This is cloud bottle, let's go. >> Super cloud again. Did you see the Berkeley paper, sky computing I think they call it? Down at Berkeley, yep Dave Linthicum from Deloitte. He's talking about, I think he calls it meta cloud. It's happening. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's happening. >> No, and because customers, customers want that. They... >> And talk about some customer example or two that you think really articulates the value of why it's happening and the outcomes that it's generating. >> I mean, I was just talking to Lamb Weston last night. So we had a reception, Lamb Weston, huge, frozen potatoes. They serve like, I dunno, some ungodly percentage of all the french fries to all the fast food. It's unbelievable what they do. Do you know, they have special chemicals they put on the french fries. So when you get your DoorDash, they stay crispy longer. They've invented that patented it. But anyway, it's all these businesses you've never heard of and they do all the, and again, they're moving to SAP or they're actually SAP in the cloud, they're one of the first ones. They did it through Accenture. They're pulling it back off from Accenture. They're not happy with the service they're getting. They're going to use us for their networking and network security because they're going to get that visibility and control back. And they're going to repatriate it back from a managed service and bring it back and run it in-house. And the SAP basis engineers want it to happen because they see the visibility and control that the infrastructure guy's going to get because of us, which leads to, all they care about is uptime and performance. That's it. And they're going to say the infrastructure team's going to lead to better uptime and better performance if it's running on Aviatrix. >> And business performance and uptime, business critical >> That is the business. That is the business. >> It is. So what are some of the things next coming down the pike from Aviatrix? Any secret sauce you can share? >> Lot of secrets. So, two secrets. One, the next thing people really want to do, embedded network security into the network. We've kind of talked about this. You're going to be seeing some things from us. Where does network security belong? In the network. Embedded in the fabric of the network, not as this dumb device called the next-gen firewall that you steer traffic to. It has to be into the fabric of what we do, what we call airspace. You're going to see us talk about that. And then the next thing, back to the maturity of the cloud, as they build out the core, guess what they're doing? It's this thing called edge, Dave, right? And guess what they're going to do? It's not about connecting the cloud to the edge to the cloud with dumb things like SD-WAN, right? Or SaaS. It's actually the other way around. Go into the cloud, turn around, look out at the edge and say, how do I extend the cloud out to the edge, and make it look like a VPC. That's what people are doing. Why, 'cause I want the operational model. I want all the things that I can do in the cloud out at the edge. And everyone knows it's been in networking. I've been in networking for 37 years. He who wins the core does what? Wins the edge, 'cause that's what happens. You do it first in the core and then you want one architecture, one common architecture, one consistent way of doing everything. And that's going to go out to the edge and it's going to look like a VPC from an operational model. >> And Amazon's going to support that, no doubt. >> Yeah, I mean every, you know, every, and then it's just how do you want to go do that? And us as the networking and network security provider, we're getting dragged to the edge by our customer. Because you're my networking provider. And that means, end to end. And they're trying to drag us into on-prem too, yeah. >> Lot's going on, you're going to have to come back- >> Because they want one networking vendor. >> But wait, and you say what? >> We will never do like switches and any of the keep Arista, the Cisco, and all that kind of stuff. But we will start sucking in net flow. We will start doing, from an operational perspective, we will integrate a lot of the things that are happening in on-prem into our- >> No halfway house. >> Copilot. >> No halfway house, no two architectures. But you'll take the data in. >> You want one architecture. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right play. >> Amazing stuff. >> And he who wins the core, guess what's more strategic to them? What's more strategic on-prem or cloud? Cloud. >> It flipped three years ago. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So he who wins in the clouds going to win everywhere. >> Got it, We'll keep our eyes on that. >> Steve: Cause and effect. >> Thank you so much for joining us. We've got your bumper sticker already. It's been a great pleasure having you on the program. You got to come back, there's so, we've- >> You posting the bumper sticker somewhere? >> Lisa: It's going to be our Instagram. >> Oh really, okay. >> And an Instagram sto- This is new for you guys. Always coming up with new ideas. >> Raising the bar. >> It is, it is. >> Me advance, I mean, come on. >> I love it. >> All right, for our guest Steve Mullaney and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.